In The City of Sylvia

Reasons I loved this:

- Made me forget it was a film. A scene of a man sitting on the terrace cafe of Strasbourg's Conservatoire watching people drinking and chatting lasts for over 20 minutes. As a summation of another film put it, "pure cinema". As Peter Bradshaw put it, "In the City of Sylvia reminds you that most cinema discourages you from looking, really looking".

- Sound design as good as Elephant. Came out of the cinema with an exaggerated ear for footsteps, the rise and fall of chattering voices.

- The lack of dialogue. One scene of a conversation in nearly an hour and a half.
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- the quietness of the film.

- And the length of the takes. Long, long, long...

- The loveliness of Strasbourg in the summer. Made me want to go there.
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- The depth of field of the compositions. Watching a square opening onto many alleys with no idea where people were going to come from, sound emanating from behind the camera, beyond the camera, people crossing, passing each other and the camera, a bottle rolling down the street, a bicycle going past...

- The hints at other directors - Hitchcock, Linklater etc ...

- The ability to create amazing suspense from a simple encounter. When the man finally asks the girl if she's Sylvia, I, like Bradshaw, was on the edge of my seat.

- The many interpretations it gives. Lil hated it (at first?) for its focus on beautiful women. I saw it as an extremely subtle comment on the images we create, both in terms of the dreams we make for ourselves based on very little fact, and the images we as a society create of women and romantic love.

- The imaginative visuals created from filming the reflections the windows of moving trams - people look ghostly, like apparitions, their form not certain.

- This is definitely in my top films of the year so far. Can't make up my mind whether it has toppled The Class or not. Here's the trailer:



And here, actually, is the first 9 minutes of the film! This Youtube user has uploaded the whole film in 9 parts. As there's hardly any dialogue, anyone can watch it!

Head On & Slacker

These are only lumped together because I watched them around the same time, but interestingly they share an importance: they are both interesting from the point of view of tracing a director's development.

Head-On I went out and bought the day after I saw The Edge of Heaven. The themes of displacement and the uneasy relationship between Germany and Turkey, and the conflicted identities of those born in one but raised in another are present in Head-On as much as they are in The Edge of Heaven, but there's a certain fear perhaps of going too far with them. Maybe not, maybe I'm looking for differences when actually there aren't any. Having said that, I enjoyed The Edge of Heaven more, perhaps for apparently superficial reasons like there being a character who was a lecturer in it or perhaps for deeper, more-difficult-to-enunciate reasons. I think I felt that The Edge of Heaven was more assured, less afraid to tackle big themes. Someone in the Guardian called it daring, whereas Head-On was more tentative.

Slacker I didn't like very much. It looked far too much like an exercise, an experiment, than an actual film. Nevertheless, I'd never considered it in the view of Before Sunrise and Sunset, films I love and which share a similar walking-and-talking aesthetic. But whereas those films are full of the warmth of well-drawn characters, Slacker is empty, almost vacuous. Perhaps it was intended - as a reflection of the characters? - but it doesn't hold up: once you've seen one switch of characters, you've seen them all. You never get to know any of the human beings in the film and in fact the greatest character is the city itself, despite the fact you're never actually told what city it is. Writing that I'm reminded of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, but whereas that film managed to create an entire world simply by wandering its physical parameters, Slacker seems naive, not thought through, as if Richard Linklater had this concept and padded it out.