Sylvie's Love

1957, Harlem. Sylvie works in her father's record shop. Her fiancé is in the army. A musician comes in looking for work and is hired: Robert plays saxophone and is in a quartet. The two spend the summer together. Then the group takes a job in Paris and he leaves. Years later they meet again in New York. Sylvie works in television and wants to produce; Robert is a known musician. Each has their own work and their own plan. Eugene Ashe writes and directs. Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie and Nnamdi Asomugha plays Robert. The form is deliberately classical; the narrative uses the shape of Hollywood melodrama of the fifties and sixties and the colour, costume and music are built to match. The matter it treats is the woman's career; Sylvie chooses her work over the relationship and the film does not present that as a sacrifice. Television production of the period is shown in detail and those sections are its most concrete side. The jazz scene is the second axis; the years in which the music changed commercially are inside the narrative. The film chooses not to put racism at the centre; the narrative does not reduce the daily life of its black characters to a story of struggle, and that is a deliberate choice. Its limit is predictability; the plot proceeds as the genre expects. Who it is for: viewers who like romantic drama in a classical manner and period films. Who it is not for: the plot is familiar, the pace slow, and the ending what you expect.