Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

Syvlie’s Love is very much an old-school, standard love story, right down to its mid-twentieth century period setting. And, ironically, that’s what makes it special. How often do you see fairly standardized romances in which the primary characters happen to be Black, particularly set in the fifties and sixties? Honestly, this type of movie isn’t typically what I immediately go for, but I’m sure glad it exists. I can only presume plenty of others are as well.

Inevitably plenty of others aren’t, for varyingly stupid reasons. It’s no surprise that the user scores on sites like MetaCritic.com and RottenTomatoes.com are notably lower than their aggregate review scores, although the difference is still narrower than it might have been just a few years ago. And this gets into my favorite thing about Sylvie’s Love: this is not a fantasy in which history worked differently and in Black people’s favor, as in the Netflix series Bridgerton (which gets no hate from me, for the record; I very much enjoy it). Instead, even though the characters acknowledge its existence, this is a movie in which marginalization has nothing to do with the story it’s telling.

In fact, Sylvie’s Love allows its characters to enjoy successes in historical context, which were unusual but still plausible. Furthermore, it is surprisingly feminist, as one of the road blocks for the central couple is Sylvie’s ambition as a TV producer, and Robert—gasp!—not wanting their relationship to get in the way of her success. In fact, both characters make choices that postpone their inevitable union not with selfishness as in so many other movies, but with selflessness.

Nnamdi Asomugha plays Robert, and pulls double duty as one of the movie’s many producers. Tessa Thompson steps into the role of Sylvie, as we first meet her briefly in 1963 and then the story flashes back to her young adulthood five years earlier, in 1953. She has a fiancé who is away traveling; Robert is part of a jazz band soon set to leave for a gig in Paris. And so it goes with these sorts of romances: multiple barriers to these two people getting together even though they are in love with each other, until one day they get past those barriers. For Sylvie and Robert, it takes many years, which only adds to the romance, to which writer-director Eugene Ashe lends a subtly sweet, comfortingly mellow tone.

We return to that opening scene from 1963 about halfway through the film, at which point the two lovebirds find themselves facing an all new set of barriers. It’s all pretty contrived, honestly, but it’ll still work just as well as any other romance for the type of viewer who is interested in such things.

I keep thinking of the oft-repeated notion of Black people having to work twice as hard, or be twice as excellent, as their white counterparts in order to achieve the same success. And while I hesitate to call Sylvie’s Love “mediocre”—it’s a step above mediocre—it still follows the same formulaic story beats as countless movies that came before it. I certainly can’t speak to how difficult it might have been to get made, but it’s here, it exists, and it offers a kind of representation not seen before. This movie in particular is no more “excellent” than any other romance, but its existence still means something. It seems a step in the right direction when plenty of viewers might react with an “Eh” (I lean closer to that), and yet plenty of others might still be into it. We’re slowly getting to a point where a variety of films can get made with diverse casts without it having to be either exploitation or tragedy porn.

Granted, a lot is more difficult to gauge in a world with no actual box office revenue to speak of. There’s no real way to decide whether this movies is a “success,” and that’s the case with virtually any movie in 2020 or 2021, unless it miraculously generates a ton of buzz on social media. All I can say is, this movie is right there, on Prime Video, and if you love romances, it’s well worth watching. Its characters are just regular people, who exist in a regular movie, living and loving. I can’t call it a romance for the ages, but it’s certainly a romance for our time.

Overall: B