Writer-director Eugene Ash’s Sylvie’s Love takes audiences on a pleasant, if somewhat flavorless, trip back to civil rights-era New York City. As with so many films set in the mid-20th century, it has an affinity for the colorful fashions and monochromatic furnishings of the era, from crimson shawls to teal telephones to bold yellow kitchen cabinets. Its expansive soundtrack also presents a sonic tour of early R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, which creates some atmosphere, even if it’s more of a general vibe than something truly unique to the story being told. Sumptuous costuming and nostalgic musical cues evoke a tone of romanticism, but the film is less successful at crafting fully embodied characters who would lend this generalized atmosphere a measure of psychological specificity or depth.
The couple at the center of Sylvie’s Love, aspiring television producer Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) and saxophone savant Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha), never quite evince the deep longing for each other that Declan Quinn’s camera does for the look of the period. The pair meet in the summer of 1957 when Robert walks into the record store owned by Sylvie’s father (Lance Reddick), where he’s spotted Sylvie idly watching TV while tending the counter. Robert asks for a job in order to get closer to her, an application that Sylvie rejects only to be overruled by her father—a seemingly major figure in Sylvie’s life who, except for an important phone call late in the film, somewhat mystifyingly fades out of view soon after hiring Robert.
Sylvie is engaged to the son of the wealthiest black family in Harlem, Lacy Parker (Alamo Miller), who’s serving in the Army in South Korea, and as such she’s reluctant to act on her attraction to Robert. If the mutuality of their attraction is made convincing by the camera’s warm close-ups on Thompson and Asomugha’s disarming smiles, its development into a full-blown romance isn’t quite as effective. The script never finds the spark that would imbue this coupling with a sense of passion or urgency. A pivotal moment in the romance comes when Sylvie and Robert end up inadvertently locked in the basement of the record shop together, but their resulting conversation, in which Sylvie proves her musical knowledge by recommending Sonny Rollins’s newest album, comes off like a technically proficient piece of screenwriting rather than an organic event in the formation of a couple.
The story flashes forward five years and thereby catches up with itself, as a very brief prologue set in 1962 had shown us Sylvie and Robert running into each other outside of a Nancy Wilson concert. Sylvie’s now in a prosperous but increasingly unhappy marriage to Lacy, into which Robert’s reappearance throws an additional wrench. But despite some sensitively staged and exquisitely photographed sequences—the highlight of which is one that intercuts between the separate New Year’s parties of the momentarily estranged lovers as they both encounter fateful revelations—the ensuing drama feels all too inevitable, at times even too easy.
Perhaps this is because of Ash’s tendency to condense interpersonal confrontations into baldly articulated slogans, like when Sylvie informs Lacy, “I can’t be the woman of your dreams while also trying to be the woman of mine.” Such lines point to the way that the scenes depicting the breakup of Sylvie’s marriage, her resumed affair with Robert, her rise within the white male-dominated world of TV, and the civil rights movement that’s happening on the story’s margins are all designed to be easily digestible. These struggles are resolved or transcended by a carefully worded line or, in the case of Sylvie’s big promotion, mostly just waiting.
Sylvie’s Love appears to be a part of an important ongoing push to tell black stories that aren’t solely about suffering, but the lack of detail in its depiction of both the social and psychological aspects of its characters’ lives hampers the impact of its drama and even borders on creating a false impression of the era in which it’s set. The film offers an evident love for the elegant vivaciousness of bebop culture and for the look of (mostly upper-crust) black life in midcentury Harlem, but ultimately not much beyond that.
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