Post by Dracula on Jan 13, 2021 16:12:47 GMT -5
Sylvie’s Love(12/31/2020)
Sylvie’s Love is a movie that sort of snuck up on me having shown up on Amazon Prime without a ton of fanfare or buzz in the lead up but having received solid reviews and a pretty classy looking poster. The film is set in 1950s Harlem and looks at a difficult romance between a woman who begins the film working in a record store and a jazz saxophonist. It’s shot using the style of the Technicolor melodramas of the era, particularly the work of Douglas Sirk. In a way it’s kind of trying to give audiences the classic Hollywood movie about middle class African Americans that Hollywood itself denied them during that actual time. This is not exactly the first movie to draw inspiration from those movies, Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven comes to mind as another film that tried to replicate Sirk’s films while more explicitly addressing the social issues he could only hint at and even before that movie there was also Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but those movies were closer to being near remakes of All That Heaven Allows while this uses Sirk’s work more as a stylistic touchstone. The actual story more closely resembles the recent films Cold War and Chico and Rita, both movies involving bittersweet romances with musicians set over the course of several years in which circumstance keeps splitting lovers up and bringing them back together again. In a lot of ways it’s a movie I liked the idea of more than the actual movie. I’m generally a sucker for recreations of classic cinema but I must say that Sirk’s work has never been my favorite, or at least I’m not as crazy about it as the many filmmakers who he seems to have strongly inspired and this one never quite manages to find new and interesting ways to use that style and the story itself is interesting but not exactly revelatory or as deep as its presentation seems to suggest. It was an interesting enough movie to be worth a look if this all sounds appealing, but when you try to seem like a new classic come to life you sometimes set yourself too high of a standard.
*** out of Five
Sylvie’s Love is a movie that sort of snuck up on me having shown up on Amazon Prime without a ton of fanfare or buzz in the lead up but having received solid reviews and a pretty classy looking poster. The film is set in 1950s Harlem and looks at a difficult romance between a woman who begins the film working in a record store and a jazz saxophonist. It’s shot using the style of the Technicolor melodramas of the era, particularly the work of Douglas Sirk. In a way it’s kind of trying to give audiences the classic Hollywood movie about middle class African Americans that Hollywood itself denied them during that actual time. This is not exactly the first movie to draw inspiration from those movies, Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven comes to mind as another film that tried to replicate Sirk’s films while more explicitly addressing the social issues he could only hint at and even before that movie there was also Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, but those movies were closer to being near remakes of All That Heaven Allows while this uses Sirk’s work more as a stylistic touchstone. The actual story more closely resembles the recent films Cold War and Chico and Rita, both movies involving bittersweet romances with musicians set over the course of several years in which circumstance keeps splitting lovers up and bringing them back together again. In a lot of ways it’s a movie I liked the idea of more than the actual movie. I’m generally a sucker for recreations of classic cinema but I must say that Sirk’s work has never been my favorite, or at least I’m not as crazy about it as the many filmmakers who he seems to have strongly inspired and this one never quite manages to find new and interesting ways to use that style and the story itself is interesting but not exactly revelatory or as deep as its presentation seems to suggest. It was an interesting enough movie to be worth a look if this all sounds appealing, but when you try to seem like a new classic come to life you sometimes set yourself too high of a standard.
*** out of Five
