Warning: This article Love Sylvie spoilers. Read at your own risk.
For 90 minutes Love Sylvie, which started streaming on Amazon today, I was 100 percent on board. Two talented, gifted people – Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha – fall in love when they shouldn’t? Yes, please. Slow dancing on the street? Absolutely. Sexy, sometimes stolen on the roof? Give it to me. Years of separation after a passionate reunion? Yes, yes, a thousand times.
From writer / director / producer Eugene Ashe, Love Sylvie everything I wanted from a classic, expansive romance. It might happen in the summer, but it was the perfect movie to watch with a mug of hot chocolate and a cross-stitch pattern on a winter evening. Or at least it was – until that came to an end. The Love Sylvie I ended up turning my quiet time of this sentimental Amazon Prime new movie into an anxious, high-blood pressure festival. Apologies to Mr. Ashe, who made a very beautiful film, but I must Love Sylvie ending.
A quick summary before we get it in: Love Sylvie an original romance that tells the story of Sylvie Farrell (Thomson), who is in love with a saxophone player named Robert (Asomugha) over music and a lingering look in her father ‘s record store. This is the kind of full-story love, storybook that most people only dream of, but destinations have other plans: Sylvie is engaged to be married to a top doctor (Alano Miller ), who is currently fighting in the war, and Robert ‘s band is having a gig in Paris. Not wanting to hold him back from his big breakup, Sylvie decides not to tell Robert, when he leaves, that she is carrying her baby. Five years later, they reconnect by chance and discover that they are still in love. Despite the major obstacles in their path, they manage, ultimately, to make life work together. Sylvie is now a well-known television producer running a cookery show, while Robert’s saxophone career stops. But Robert certainly loves Sylvie and his daughter enough to let his wife go through this rough piece of his career, right?
Apparently wrong! Robert, believing he has a job offer with Motown in Detroit, is urging Sylvie to resign and spend their lives moving around the country. But when Robert goes to Detroit to work out the details of the work, he discovers that his friend wasn’t really sorry about the offer – he was talking to himself, promising not to that’s what he would do. Destroyed, Robert returns to New York. “Well,” I thought to myself, “I like him less than I did before, but at least now he’s back to his wife and he seems to be telling her what happened and I’ll watch for gigs in NYC. ”
Wrong again! Instead, Robert tells Sylvie that he is going back to Detroit on his own. He says he doesn’t want her to come because he’s not “a family man.” ”He doesn’t tell her he didn’t get the gig. He is lying with her, and he is leaving. He goes back to Detroit and secretly gets a factory job. Instead of exercising in a surprisingly suicidal egomania, this is seen as a noble sacrifice. You see, Sylvie always wanted to work in television, and now she has fulfilled her dream. In a montage of Robert reflecting on this, we have a right to understand, just as Sylvie withheld the information about his child to help him go beyond his career, now Robert can do one thing for Sylvie.
But that doesn’t make any sense! Clearly, Sylvie has already advanced her career as a married mother. Leaving it with one less childcare option is going to help… how, exactly? Breaking her heart is going to set her free … how? Explain yourself, Robert! This is crazy! Surely there are jobs of the same minimum wage he would get in New York, as a way to support a family both financially and emotionally? Is he really so obsessed with the idea that Sylvie earns more than him that he has forced his favorite people in the world to give up? Why does Tessa Thompson like this guy, again?
Perhaps the lesson here is that both Robert and Sylvie made terrible, self-sacrificing decisions in the name of love. Sylvie should have told Robert about their baby, and Robert should have told Sylvie about missing the gig. But the difference is, while we don’t intend to agree with Sylvie’s mistake, we can at least understand. She is a pregnant Black woman in the 1950s – who blamed her for choosing the “safe” option of being a doctor’s wife? Robert’s mistake, on the other hand, makes him look like a complete jerk.
So, by this point, I absolutely hate Robert. When the two finally get together – and yes, a spoiler warns, they come together, because thankfully Ashe isn’t a complete grower – it’s hardly satisfying. I mean, did my heart melt when their eyes met in the factory’s parking lot? There is. I’m not a monster, and Tessa Thompson happens to be one of the greatest actresses of our day. But instead of rooting for a kiss, now I root for Sylvie to turn on Robert anymore. Because badly, Robert, what the hell? This is not the kind of thing I have ever happily done!
At least. Three quarters of Love Sylvie is an elegant film with amazing performances from both Thompson and Asomugha. I really hate the ending.
Look Love Sylvie on Prime Video