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Reviewed by Sandra Hall
Sylvie’s Love takes us on a nostalgia trip back to New York City in the late 1950s and early 60s just before the Jazz Age was torpedoed by the arrival of rock n roll.
Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) works in her father’s record store where she indulges her twin passions, music and television. When she’s not serving one of the shop’s few customers, she’s watching sitcoms on a battered TV set. Then Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) takes a summer job in the shop and true love enters this gloriously old-fashioned romance.
Written and directed by musician Eugene Ashe, the film neatly weaves the issues of the day – race relations and feminism – into the long-running affair between Sylvie and Robert, who are both African-American, without labouring the point. Nor does it impede the music which flows smoothly and sweetly along the storyline, evoking the glamour jazz used to have before the urban young defected to Elvis and Motown. Thompson, known to Marvel fans for