José Luis Guerin's Dans la ville de Sylvia (2007)

A young man returns to Strasbourg to find a girl he met six years before, has several beers in a café terrasse just looking at every female, sees Slyvia, follows her for a long time, loses sight of her, sees her again boarding a tram, gets on it too, finds it's a different girl, goes to the bar Les Aviateurs to find her but doesn't, starts again the next day sitting on a bench at a tram stop, and still doesn't find her. The end.

It seems like so little, but it's not. In the 84 minutes the film has lasted, in spite of the apparent lack of events, in spite of the virtual absence of dialogue, we have been treated to a large number of things: the slow pace as the man watches, the sights of the city, the psychology of the timid, anxious man, the repeat of features already seen which creates an odd but comforting idea of familiarity: the same streets, in particular the Place Saint-Étienne with its Meiselocker statue; the appearance (at least three times) of the black guy with the parasol selling cigarette lighters for 5 euros; the corner with the bottles where the old alcoholic woman sits, the seemingly desperate 'Laure de t'aime' written on so many walls, etc.

Long before the end I realised Sylvia would never turn up, but then I started to wonder if she's like the rhinograde in the Musée Zoologique in the city: non-existent. A brilliant film.