Sylvie’s Love
**Seen for the 2020 Atlanta Film Festival.
There’s something almost oppressively old-fashioned in Eugene Ashe’s “Sylvie’s Love,” and that is part of its charm. Taking place Harlem, first in 1957, then in 1962-63, Ashe’s film is about two people whose connection is almost immediate, but who are unable to really express that in public for varying reasons. When they do, there is something in the way of them being able to really give themselves over to it. The performances by Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha, and Ashe’s confidence in his approach to this story, are what sell it. This is one of those movies where everything works towards a specific goal, and it’s how effectively that goal works on us as to whether it’s successful. It worked on me just fine.
The first thing we see is Thompson’s Sylvie, in 1962, waiting outside of a theatre. There, she sees Robert (Asomugha), for the first time in five years. We then cut to five years earlier, and Sylvie is a young woman, with a fiancee in the military, and she’s watching TV in her father’s record shop in Harlem. Robert is a jazz saxophonist, and one day, he walks into the store looking for the latest Thelonious Monk album, with the “Help Wanted” sign from the window. I’m not sure that it’s love at first sight for both of them, but there’s definitely a connection for both of them, and it grows over the summer, and eventually, they have a night of passion. When Robert has an opportunity to go play in Paris, he asks Sylvie to go with him, but she cannot really make that commitment. It turns out she’s also pregnant from their night together, but she doesn’t tell him as he is ready to go.
Cut to 1962, and Sylvie is a switch board operator at a TV station. She catches wind about a producer’s assistant position open, and next thing we know, she is working as such on the network’s successful cooking show. She is married to Lacy (Alano Miller), her fiancee, and they are raising the daughter Sylvie conceived with Robert that night as their own. Lacy has just landed an account at work, but with Sylvie’s new job, she’s not able to play housewife the way he expects her to, and she doesn’t really want to- she has her own ambitions. Robert is back in town, recording an album with the band, but is feeling as though, financially, he isn’t getting his fair cut. All of this builds to that moment from the beginning of the movie, when they see each other for the first time in five years. That reconnection leads to rekindled feelings between the two, and choices that need to be made.
Ashe’s screenplay is more than a little schmaltzy in how all of this plays out, revelations coming out at just the right time to cause tensions between the characters, but it honestly worked for me fine. “Sylvie’s Love” is one of those films that gives us short bursts of connection while setting up its long-game arc where we will follow these characters into their future, to see what happens. I really connect with that time of arc because it’s an interesting “What if?” scenario to show an audience. In this case, we have the added tensions of old-fashioned gender roles changing, what responsibilities one person has to another in allowing the other one to follow their passions, and the possibilities of missed opportunities. All of these ending up exactly where you expect them to by the end makes for a movie that is fairly predictable, but still sweet and endearing along the way.
