As a shadow tellingly slow-stalks across a bedroom wall, a beautiful man furrows his brow as he channels the linguistic into the concrete – thought into writing. At a café the same artist sketches the various miens of its female patrons, the dark graphite replicating the French light’s luminous caress of their faces. Yet through a slow accretion of detail, a realisation forms – a comprehension that this man is enamoured with one of the women, someone he may have met briefly years earlier. As a furtive stalking game begins, the film becomes something entirely opposite: a series of mysterious repetitions that articulate an artist’s conjoining of creativity, environs, desires and memories, a process that resounds with cinematic image construction itself. It unfurls through a series of duplications: graffiti; rolling bottles; lives and desires lived in peddled loops. Not since Antonioni’s Blow Up-era has the relationship between image and reception been so beguiling, so ambivalent. In the City of Sylvia’s photographer shows the perils of a Baudelairian protagonist attempting to freeze the world in a perfect mirror, through the timeless light of his wide eyes.