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Film couple Robert (Nnamdi Asumoghu) and Sylvie (Tessa Thompson)
Photo: Amazon
The grandiose, but also confusing thing about this film is that almost every one of its pictures looks like a cool, tasteful jazz record cover.
A young woman and a young man hang around in front of a shop window.
They smoke cigarettes on a back staircase.
They dance in the club where the man previously played the saxophone on stage.
The director Eugene Ashe bathes it all in rich, heated 1950s colors and illuminates the faces so that the cheeks glow and the teeth sparkle - while the eyes of his main characters sometimes shine like Christmas tree balls.
Strictly speaking, the US film »Sylvie's Love«, which is now being presented on Amazon, is not a Christmas film because it doesn't have much to do with decorated Christmas trees and only shows a lavish New Year's party once.
And yet it complements the blues drama "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", which has just aired on Netflix, into a festive program in which heroic characters from Afro-American culture are told in full splendor.
While in "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" Viola Davis plays a singer in the USA of the twenties who really lived and is now considered a pioneer, "Sylvie's love" tells the fictional story of a jazz saxophonist in the fifties and sixties.
The actor Nnamdi Asomugha is here a musician named Robert Halloway.
He is kind of a younger look-alike to Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins, adores Thelonius Monk and performs with his band in the then famous New York club Blue Morocco.
Love at first sight in the record store
It's gorgeous how elegantly director Ashe evokes the sound and look of a golden age of jazz without boring the viewers of his film with long concert scenes or nerdy music history facts.
Although the story is backed up with many historically guaranteed details, »Sylvie's love« does not primarily want to be an artist drama, but a melodrama.
The love story that is being negotiated here begins in 1957: at a time when the genre of melodrama - in which an adverse outside world always threatens the happiness of the couple in the center - was very popular.
However, no television station or film studio would have financed a film like this at the time.
»Sylvie's love«, based in the New York borough of Harlem (and in a club in the Bronx), shows almost exclusively African-American actors.
The young title heroine, played by Tessa Thompson (who you know from "Westworld"), helps out in her father's record store and meets saxophonist Robert (Asomugha) who has come from Detroit.
Immediately fidgety, she tells the stranger, who is enthusiastic about her, that she is already engaged to a soldier fighting in Korea - and of her ambition to work in the television business.
"Can you imagine that?
A colored woman who produces TV shows? ”Asks Sylvie's father, shaking his head, in the diction of the fifties.
The record shop owner has already employed Robert, who has no-one, who does his nightly concert appearances for a pittance, as a salesman.
Of course, later the heroine actually manages to learn the television trade.
It asserts itself in a cultural genre that has dominated the decade even more decisively than jazz music.
At some point the young people no longer wanted to listen to the jazz musicians because they were more interested in rock and pop.
This is exactly what Robert has to experience after he and Sylvie fell into love for a short summer and then were separated for years.
He travels to Paris for an engagement.
She decides to marry her fiancé, who has returned from Korea and comes from a noble background.
Spotlights on the everyday racism of the 1950s
The importance of class differences within the Afro-American community, the struggle of progressive Americans against racism and for civil rights, the gradual emancipation of women - this film casually tells about all of this.
Once Sylvie was told by a white visitor what the nicest asset of her husband, who was extremely successful in business, was: It wasn't even noticeable that he was black.
In this film, women get rid of the constraints of society and morals much more decisively than men.
She is the driving force of the love story because it is more self-confident.
In this respect, the film title has been chosen correctly.
At the same time, it complies with the rules of the genre.
"The hero of the melodrama doesn't understand his conflicts because he threatens to choke on his emotions," the critic Georg Seeßlen once described the gender-specific characteristics.
Asomugha, famous in the USA as an ex-footballer, embodies as egomaniacal artist Robert a man who always has to be cheered and guided by others - and who rarely opens his mouth out of sheer pride.
At one point, the director Ashe, who was born in 1965, has a fellow actor explain why jazz has lost the audience's favor.
"Jazz is ice cold," they claim.
You don't necessarily have to share this judgment.
And I can simply acknowledge that with the film "Sylvie's Love", Eugene Ashe kindles a blazing fire of scorching colors, New York summers and love difficulties in a rather virtuoso way.
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