Sundance review: In period romance 'Sylvie's Love,' Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha burn up the screen

’Sylvie’s Love’

★★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 114 minutes.

Screens again: Thursday, Jan. 30, 8:30 p.m., The MARC (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 3 p.m., PC Library (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 3:15 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City).

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Everyone deserves a swoon-inducing, deeply felt romantic melodrama, especially if it’s as refined and emotional as writer-director Eugene Ashe’s “Sylvie’s Love.”

The always radiant Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie, who in 1957 is working in a New York record store, owned by her father, known to all as Mr. Jay (Lance Reddick). She knows a lot about music, especially jazz, but her real passion is television. 

Sylvie is also engaged to a young man serving overseas, which makes things complicated when Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) walks into the store, looking for a Thelonious Monk album and a job. Robert is a promising saxophonist, the engine of the quartet he’s in, made up of the musicians he grew up with back in Detroit. 

Despite her better judgment, Sylvie falls in love with Robert, and vice versa. But Robert’s musical ambitions, boosted by a benefactor who calls herself The Countess (Jemima Kirke), send Robert to Europe just as Sylvie learns she’s pregnant. Sylvie marries her fiancé, Lacy (Alano Miller), has a daughter, and that would be that — until five years later, when Sylvie, working on a TV cooking show, sees Robert by chance.

Ashe and cinematographer Declan Quinn get the period details perfect, from the cars to the smooth jazz music that gives way to rock ’n’ roll. We also feel the sting of racism, though subtly, like when Sylvie learns Lacy’s prospective new clients are bigots. And we experience the march of history, obliquely, when Sylvie’s cousin Mona (Aja Naomi King), a civil-rights activist, calls in discussing her exploits.

Much of Sylvie and Robert’s love story is told through music, both in the precision of the needle drops and in a lush score by composer Fabrice Lecomte that is as full as the main characters’ hearts.

In an ensemble cast that includes Eva Longoria as a jazz scene den mother and Wendi McClendon-Covey as the cooking show’s host, this movie belongs first and foremost to Thompson and Asomugha. Their chemistry together is sizzling, and separately they convey both the longing of their lost loves and the need to create that fuels their ambitions. “Sylvie’s Love” seems destined to be one of those timeless romances that we’ll be talking about years from now.