Sylvie’s Love (2020)
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Sylvie’s Love Movie Review
Sylvie’s Love is a 2020 romance film directed by Eugene Ashe and starring Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha. It’s an old-fashioned movie for better and for worse.
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Sylvie has a summer romance with a saxophonist who takes a summer job at her father’s record store in Harlem. When they reconnect years later, they discover that their feelings for each other have not faded with the years. This movie was so traditional in its many elements that it genuinely felt like a 50s or 60s romance. Douglas Sirk movies immediately spring to mind when describing this film which also has a touch of ‘La La Land’ in it as it’s concerned with music quite a bit.
I love the traditional romance at the center of the movie. They were great together and both Asomugha and Thompson are so charming and likable. Tessa Thompson maybe wasn’t the greatest person on paper for this very old-fashioned role, but she eventually elevated the material with a lot of charm and charisma.
Others all fare significantly worse and are mostly unimportant to the overall storyline, though I loved seeing Eva Longoria for once in a film and she was so much fun. The movie is overall too traditional without ever being anything more substantial in terms of memorable moments and themes. The film favored style over substance for sure.
My main issue is that the music storyline took way too much time from the actual romance and character dynamics. There is a lot on the plate here but the job part was excessive and simply not as interesting to me, though I did appreciate some moments here and there, but the bulk of the best moments stemmed from the romance.
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Sylvie’s Love looks very charming, it evoked the sixties so well and the score is also terrific. The pacing is quick and the movie runs down smoothly. This is one of those movies which entirely ignore the plight of an entire race, but then again that was the point for them to have an unrealistic fairy tale romance, and in that area it mostly worked.
