IN WHAT must be a record, four of this week's new releases are documentaries. In the City of Sylviacould qualify as a fifth given that, on one level, it is formed as an observational picture of Strasbourg.

One hesitates to traduce the film by categorising it as a travelogue, tempting as that is, because its ambitions go beyond that: to deal with desire, and to pay homage to cinema (explicitly in the case of Hitchcock's masterpiece, Vertigo) and paintings.

To describe the movie as minimalist would be an understatement, and most of the intermittent dialogue amounts to the smallest of small talk. It involves an unnamed young Frenchman (blankly played by Xavier Lafitte), introduced as he sits pensively, pencil in hand taking notes at his hotel. In a cafe, he stares at a woman before attempting to strike up conversation, but she doesn’t respond.

In another cafe the next day, his attention is drawn to another woman (Pilar López de Ayala) whom he follows doggedly through the winding streets of the city. Suspicions that he’s a stalker are eventually allayed when it transpires that he’s seeking out a woman named Sylvia who has occupied his mind since she drew him a map with directions six years earlier.

The Frenchman’s obsessive quest prompts one to wonder why he waited so long to return to Strasbourg and seek her out, but Catalan writer-director José Luis Guerín has no interest in addressing any narrative concerns in a film content to capture the sights and sounds of Strasbourg, which it does with technical precision.

The premise is intriguing up to a point, but the consequences are meandering, just as they were when Guerín came to Ireland and made Innisfree(1990), his naive exploration of John Ford's The Quiet Manand the Mayo village of Cong, where that production was based.

Directed by Jose Luis Guerín. Starring Xavier Lafitte, Pilar López de Ayala PG cert, Queen's, Belfast; Screen, Dublin, 84 min★★