chairvaincre Maybe it's personal, but I can't get over how much the filmmaker seems to want to project himself onto this portrait of the artist as a tres handsome, young broody male version of Farrah Fawcett. You know the type--pale, anemic, wane, tends to wax on about clouds or girls or some other such nonsense, in a self-imposed 'exile' to a land of pseudo-intellectual pretension (Petrarch--check) but whose values are completely mainstream, safely unsafe. Conventionally unconventional.Plus the male chauvinistic gaze just really grates me. If this guy is so allegedly obsessed with 'Sylvie,' then why does he so nonchalantly flirt/sleep with some other woman? It seems a little disingenuous.I get the filmmaker is trying to play with fiction, documentation etc etc. 'Play' is the right word, however. It doesn't get much deeper than that, and lacks the intensity of films of other (better, more seasoned, and more profound) directors in a similar vein--Marker, Akerman, Jia etc.If you're going to put yourself in your own work, you better make sure you don't come off an oblivious a**hole.

writers_reign Guerin makes Erich Rohmer look like Speedy Gonzales and elevates watching paint dry to a new level. As a travelogue it's interesting and shows downtown Strasbourg from several angles none of which is designed to put potential visitors off. It's semi-referential on several levels recalling among other Before Sunrise/Sunset in both of which two young people explored a city. Here, of course, though there are two young people involved they are not together inasmuch as one is more or less stalking the other in the (as it turns out) mistaken belief that she is someone he knows. For reasons best known to Guerin he has split his non-action over three days in which nothing happens all at once. Nice pictures shame about lack of plot.

robert burton It is one of the most written about and blogged about films of the last few years.References abound,from Bresson to Hitchcock,Rohmer,Murnau,even Dante and Petrarch,but is it too slender to sustain such a formidable weight of cultural allusions? While it is undoubtedly true that it is reminiscent of many other films,there is something sufficiently fresh and different which makes it definitely stand out. The story could not be more simple.A dreamy looking young man waits alone in a café in Strasbourg scanning each female passer by in the hope that she may be Sylvia whom he met in the city six years ago.Eventually he sees someone who may be her and he begins to obsessively pursue her through a labyrinth of streets and alleyways.Yes, "Vertigo" is of course brought to mind and there is a wealth of allusions to the feminist theory of the controlling power of the male gaze.But there is more to it than that.The ditching of much narrative,characterisation and even dialogue give rise to a new form of cinema experience,a concentration on the purely sensuous aspect of cinema,an increased awareness of the power of everyday sights and sounds which cinema usually elides in favour of a forward thrusting narrative and a well-defined protagonist.

minkvill I saw this at the Sydney Fim Fest today and it was the third film in a row I saw, so that's maybe why I struggled to keep my eyes open :-) This film had such good ratings, especially all the 9's and 10's, that I decided to see it. Perhaps 3 out of 10 is a little harsh - I can see how Guerin's vision is unique in terms of creating the voyeuristic experience. There is virtually no dialogue so we are only left with the visual, which is relatively repetitive - and the sound, or often the lack thereof - once again repetitive and almost trance inducing, all those foot steps and the same extras. I'm going to go with the shallow end of the gene pool and call it "boring" - which is pretty trite considering that Guerin obviously thought a lot about how this film was going to be made and it is somewhat unique in that sense, I will give him that.... Most directors don't make such alienatory films.