Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Amazon Prime original movie Sylvie’s Love is a high-style, big-heart throwback romance starring Tessa Thompson and NFL star-turned-actor Nnamdi Asomugha that — REVIEW SPOILER ALERT — is a delightful early Christmas gift. Asomugha has producer credit on the film written and directed by Eugene Ashe, who applies a lightly melodramatic tone, a finely tuned sense of mid-century music and period visual detail to a sharp script. Maybe you should stop reading this and just watch it?
SYLVIE’S LOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: New York City, 1962. Wearing a succulent blue dress and long white gloves, Sylvie (Thompson) hovers outside a theater, looking stood-up. Soon, she’s alone. She doesn’t seem overly upset, but she’s such a sight, we’ll bear that weight for her. The show’s about to start. She spots a man on the sidewalk eyeing the poster. Nancy Wilson smokily croons Nearness of You on the soundtrack. “Robert,” she says. “Robert Holloway.” It’s not a question. She knows.
Five years earlier. Mr. Jay’s Records, Harlem. Sylvie sits, entranced by Lucille Ball on television. Her father, Herbert (Lance Reddick), tinkers with a broken fan. Her mother stares out from a flyer on the countertop, advertising her finishing school. Robert (Asomugha) walks into the frame, holding the HELP WANTED sign he plucked from the window. The night before, he wrapped one of many nightclub gigs with a jazz quartet. He’s a saxophonist from Detroit, the group’s star who plays with smoldering passion; they’re in town to join the scalding-hot New York jazz boom. Of course, the pay ain’t great. A side job would help. And he also needs the latest slab of wax by Thelonious Monk. Robert and Sylvie banter. She has a whole amazing spiel about how the HELP WANTED sign is just a prop and no HELP is really WANTED. But Herbert walks in the room and hires him immediately. He gets the new Monk side free. A nice perk, but the job will soon yield further fringe benefits.
Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? Friends, it’s like butter and cream. He walks up the steps from the record shop basement and bemusedly watches as Sylvie rocks and hops to Bill Haley’s “See You Later, Alligator” with a broom-guitar in her hands. Busted. She’s embarrassed in the most wonderful way. They get locked in the basement together. He gently but assuredly reaches up to her ear, plucks a hairpin to pick the lock. She and her best friend Mona (Aja Naomi King) gussy up and attend his next gig. He takes a solo; she’s just taken. Robert here may just be the next John Coltrane, she flatters.
Did I mention Sylvie’s engaged? Well, he’s in Korea. Military service. Big rock on her finger. Is he rich? “I’m afraid terribly,” she says. The band lands a manager, and a trip to Paris to tour looms. But this is magnetism, and you can’t really stop it. The camera pans up. What’s in the stars? Love? Complication? Trouble? It’s all the same thing, isn’t it?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sylvie’s Love delivers a richly earnest mid-century love story with a knowing wink, a lot like Todd Haynes’ 2015 stunner Carol.
Performance Worth Watching: Tessa Thompson is breathtaking. Her presence is one of subtle, delectable charm. She sells the script’s grander pronouncements of love and regret with sincerity and grace.
Memorable Dialogue: This:
“I think you very well could be the next John Coltrane.”
“And what are you going to be?”
“Your biggest fan.”
(We all melt like caramel in the sun)
Sex and Skin: One gauzy, steamy hotel-room mambo depicted within the film’s meritorious boundaries of restraint.
Our Take: Sylvie’s Love of course wraps back around to that opening scene with the blue dress and the white gloves, and continues on from there, because there’ve been developments, and they demand further developing, possibly forever, because that’s just the way the momentum of life flows. Desires in love and careers mingle, ebb and rush; life on the surface covers the life within and the life within sometimes gets so intensely warm it must break the surface. These characters make mistakes that are only so on the surface, as some mistakes are actually the right thing to do. Pragmatism has no place in love.
Ashe has crafted a ravishing longing-look-across-the-room romance, stretching it to a supple, across-the-years drama sustained with quiet, measured longing. He by no means reinvents the mechanisms of cinematic romance, but he nurtures the savory tone so carefully, material that might be tough steak elsewhere is rendered fall-apart-tender beef bourguignon here. You know how song lyrics can be bad poetry until they pass through the pipes of a gifted singer? Same idea.
Natural lighting, sumptuous costumes, the warm and grainy look of film, a lovingly romanticized vision of New York’s ’50s/’60s bustle and marquees (La Dolce Vita; nice) and the music — oh, the music — contribute to the spellbinding experience of watching Sylvie’s Love. The filmmaker and bulk of the characters are Black, but this isn’t a story of racial identity. Such problems nudge their way into the story (a business partner speaks of Black men with “good diction,” and Mona becomes a career activist), as they inevitably must. It’s more feminist than anything, emphasizing Sylvie’s decisions as a woman pursuing her career passion in the 1960s. Characters surprise us by avoiding cliches, the heavy dramatic moments never feel too big or too small and the movie is exquisitely peppered with sly comedy, delivered with measured charisma by its inspired, dialed-in leads. It clunks slightly here and there, but its charms are so ubiquitous, it’ll lift you. What a lovely, lovely film.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Sylvie’s Love is an alchemical wonder. Wrap it in a bow and watch it to warm up your holiday.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.
