Spanish filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin is a watcher. In his previous film, the extraordinary (and criminally underrated) “In the City of Sylvia,” his male protagonist spends near the entire duration observing women with a longing gaze, first at a cafe where he sketches their gorgeous faces on his notepad, then throughout a breathless slow-motion chase down winding, Escher-like alleyways, in pursuit of one woman he may or may not know. Guerin’s latest, “Guest,” is something of an offshoot of his last one, and it’s a documentary that’s as much a fiction as his narratives are nonfiction.
It follows Guerin as he tours the festival circuit for a period of one year, but before you go accusing the filmmaker of “Slacker Uprising” levels of narcissistic self-promotion, understand that he himself never appears on screen, and that while we do get a glimpse inside the Venice Film Festival (both in 2007 and 2008, the first being ‘Sylvia’s’ premiere, the second serving as “Guest’s” proper bookend, replete with cameos from Chantal Akerman and Abbas Kiarostami), the bulk of the film instead chooses to keep Guerin behind the camera. The filmmaker roves through the streets of various Latin American countries, interviewing the people he finds there—or, more accurately, offering them a forum for their stories, however long-winded and sometimes incomprehensible they may be. In the process, Guerin engages with socio-political and religious tensions, as well as more elusive truths about cultural identity.
But unlike other filmmakers who straddle the line of fiction and nonfiction—such as Jia Zhang-ke, Pedro Costa, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose “Mysterious Object at Noon” may be this film’s closest cousin)—Guerin is less interested in how his subjects’ stories feed into any kind of unifying theme or narrative than he is in the faces and physical features of those telling them, captured in vivid black and white. While seemingly an odd choice at first, the black and white lends itself well to Guerin’s intended role as a portrait artist, and he uses his unconventional approach to characterize his subjects in ways more intangible and enigmatic than a simple interview may have rendered.
In the film’s most telling moment, Guerin asks an actual portrait artist he meets on the street, “What’s the secret of a good portrait?” To which the woman responds, “There are many secrets.” For all the clarity and beauty Guerin brings to this fascinating humanist snapshot, it’s his willingness to accept and revel in life’s unknowable mysteries that is perhaps most striking about his film. [B] – Sam Mac courtesy of InReviewOnline