Review: Sylvie's Love

Image courtesy of Amazon.

Eugene Ashe's visually stunning "Sylvie's Love" is a film that had it been released in the era in which it was set - the late 1950s to early 1960s - it would have been described as a "women's picture," and would likely have been directed by the great Douglas Sirk. Stylistically and thematically, it comes across as a Todd Haynes ("Far from Heaven" and "Carol") film with a primarily Black cast. That's a compliment. 

The film is set amid a time of pivotal change in the United States, and while the lead character's cousin, a minor character, does some work for the Civil Rights Movement, race and politics are surprisingly only given minor attention in the picture - at one point, the titular character's husband has a dinner with a possibly important client, whom his wife discovers has been attacked by the NAACP for discriminatory practices. 

But otherwise, "Sylvie's Love" is primarily a gorgeously rendered period romance. Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) is engaged to a fiance whom, at the film's beginning, is out of town. She works part-time at her father's (Lance Reddick) record store in New York City in 1957. Her mother (Erica Gimpel) runs a finishing school for young ladies. One day, a talented saxophonist named Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) who plays in a jazz band known as Dickie Brewster's Quartet enters the record store to inquire about a job as a sales clerk. 

Both Robert and Sylvie - although she might not admit it - are taken with each other from the start. He has dreams of playing his own music and leading his own band, while she, an avid television watcher, wants to become a TV producer. Over the course of the summer, their romance blossoms, although we know that her fiance will one day return, and then Robert's band gets offered a gig playing at a Paris jazz club over a period of months. Sylvie discovers she's pregnant, but rather than tell Robert and prevent him from leaving, she keeps the secret to herself. 

Five years pass. One night, Sylvie runs into Robert in New York outside of a performance hall where she's planning on seeing a concert. The two reconnect, which naturally causes tension between Sylvie and her businessman husband, Lacy (Alano Miller). Also, Sylvie is currently in the process of working her way up in the TV business, acting as an assistant to a Black woman producer on a cooking show. This interferes with Lacy's view of Sylvie's domestic duties. Meanwhile, Robert comes to find that jazz isn't as popular as when he first started out, and that pop music has drowned out the art form. 

"Sylvie's Love" is technically a melodrama, but then again so are Haynes' films, although they're typically swimming with brilliant subtext. Ashe's film is more content to play out on the surface, which is perfectly fine because the surface is so stunning. Using film stock that makes specific sequences look as if they're from the era in which they're set, and filled with splashes of color and gorgeous photography, the film is often beautiful visually. 

Thompson and Asomugha give strong leading performances and there are some very good supporting ones as well - Reddick is particularly good as Thompson's good natured, record store-owning father. Its story is a classic Hollywood romance, although the film was made independently, and its winsome nature goes a long way. This is a sleeper film - I hadn't heard of it until it was released in late December, and now I'm very glad that I have.