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Desire and dreams meet beautifully in “Sylvie’s Love,” an old-fashioned romance for 21st-century hearts. Modestly scaled yet emotionally expansive, it tracks a pair of young lovers over years of happiness and regret, from the late 1950s to the early ’60s. As the world turns, they meet, fall hard, hesitate and separate. Amid the kisses and sighs, Nancy Wilson sings (“all my bright tomorrows belong to you”), and the screen floods with bold colors and passions. Abandon that fortress you’re hiding in, this movie says. Let the feelings in, let the tears flow — this is what films are made for.
Our heroine, Sylvie — an irresistible Tessa Thompson — lives with her parents in Harlem. She works in her father’s record store (Monk in that bin, Sonny Rollins over there) and dutifully models when her mother teaches etiquette to girls in saddle shoes. Sylvie, with her pixie haircut and perfectly fitted turtleneck, her doe eyes and softly expressive face, looks like she should be waiting for her close-up on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer backlot. But she is a Black woman in 1957 America and that kind of cinematic adoration won’t be afforded characters like hers until movies like this can be made, films that show you what motion pictures could have and should have been.
When an up-and-coming saxophonist, Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha, a producer on the movie), walks into the record store, the story quickly settles into its groove. Sparks fly, although it takes Sylvie a little longer than Robert to notice (or admit) what’s happening. She has a fiancé, the son of a wealthy doctor, whom she met at a cotillion. What’s a cotillion, Robert asks, one of the story’s nods at class difference. But Robert is cute and flirty, and soon he and Sylvie are restlessly exchanging meaningful looks. When they finally kiss, the moment is as tremulous and carefully staged as a classic studio romance: It’s night, the lighting is beautiful and so are they.
“Sylvie’s Love” is just the second feature from Eugene Ashe, who knows how to move the camera (and when not to), but also how to stage inside the frame. He’s an obvious cineaste; a scene in a Chinese restaurant flooded with red lighting reads like a fluttering valentine to Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love.” But Ashe isn’t indulging in fanboy allusions to burnish his credentials. Rather, like Todd Haynes in his tragic melodrama “Far From Heaven” (and Douglas Sirk once upon a studio time), Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.
Because Ashe takes melodrama seriously, he commits to its lush sincerity. He doesn’t wink at you, soliciting knowing giggles about the nakedness of the emotions. Instead, he asks you to go all in, to fall in love with Sylvie and Robert the way they tumble for each other, to worry and root for them. That’s easy to do because both actors are so appealing. Thompson’s ability to externalize emotions is particularly important for what Ashe is doing and why he holds on her face when she first hears Robert play in a club. As she listens, her face opens and the feelings rush in — animating it, warming it — and it’s clear that now she really sees him.
Ashe leans on Thompson, letting her do a lot of the work when Sylvie and Robert are together. Asomugha is a good reactor and nice to watch, but he doesn’t have Thompson’s emotive range. The rest of the cast is first rate and includes a number of welcome faces, among them Eva Longoria, Lance Reddick, Erica Gimpel and Aja Naomi King. I’m less persuaded by Jemima Kirke as the Countess, a wealthy jazz fan who swoops into Robert’s life, providing cash and connections. A more convincing emblem of how white paternalism comes sheathed in patronage might have been good, but then, like most of the white characters, the Countess is fairly irrelevant.
That’s to the movie’s point. “Sylvie’s Love” does a largely convincing job recreating a 1950s Hollywood melodrama, if not in all its particulars than certainly in its emphasis on passionate emotions and feelings. The characters don’t sound like they’ve spent time on the couch; they talk and sometimes figure things out, but they don’t over-explain with self-help insights. At times, they mouth clunkers (“the times they are a-changin’”), because Ashe’s script isn’t always up to his ambitions. But it’s lovely when the filmmaking does the talking, when the opulent score swirls and the palette vibrates with its many shades of blue and splashes of bright red, green and pumpkin.
Ashe’s most radical move is how he marshals classic melodrama to tell a story of Black love that would never have been told in old Hollywood. (Today’s commercial mainstream has pretty much given up on pure romance, alas.) Particularly instructive is his insistent focus on the inner lives of his characters, on what Sylvie and Robert long for, and dream of, as human beings, rather than as emblems of race or avatars of ideals. The larger world presses in, as it must, and there are references to the civil rights movement here and there. Yet as important are all the white faces on the TV shows that Sylvie watches, images that she studies and hopes to one day change.
Ashe wants you to consider the lives of his lovers, but he also wants you to swoon, he wants you to make the empathetic leap so you feel — and think — about other lives deep in your body. Critics used to sneer about melodramas, dismissing them as three-hankie weepies. Bring tissues, they wrote, advice that ridiculed both the films and their presumptive female audience. You should grab tissues to watch “Sylvie’s Love,” but I mean it encouragingly. I watched the movie early one December morning alone. I was transfixed, and transported. This year has given us many things to cry about, but here is a story to get lost in and to pleasurably, gratefully, weep along with.
Sylvie’s Love
Rated PG-13 for adult life. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Amazon.
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