Film Review: All you need is ‘Sylvie’s Love’
Eugene Ashe s blissfully romantic film starring Tessa Thompson is set in an idealized world but the emotions are real.
Cary Darling December 16, 2020Updated: December 21, 2020, 11:22 am
Nnamdi Asomugha and Tessa Thompson in Sylvie s Love Photo: Nicola Goode/Amazon Studios / Courtesy of Amazon Studios
Director/writer Eugene Ashe’s “Sylvie’s Love” is set among African Americans in mid-20th-century New York, but any mention of discrimination or the growing civil rights movement is pushed to the periphery. That might seem unrealistic the film spans 1957-1963, years of “I Have a Dream,” Freedom Riders and Bull Connor but this swooning soap opera is less August Wilson and more Douglas Sirk, the white director of 1950s-era films with such eye-grabbing titles as “Magnificent Obsession,” “All That Heaven Allows” and “The Tarnished Angels.”