I had written brief reviews of these two films from 2020, then promptly forgot about them. Though they are in two different genres -- an animated comedy and an old-fashioned romance -- they both use music, specifically jazz, as an essential part of the life of the characters. And two years on, they are both worth watching.
1. Soul (2020)
Directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers
With the voices of Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Phylicia Rashad, and others
I am generally fond of animated movies, and this one is special for a number of reasons. It's the first Disney animated movie to feature a modern-day African American man as the main protagonist. It's a story that centers on the value of an African American music genre, jazz, and shows in detail what it is to perform it and how transforming it can be for listeners and creators. It posits an African American woman instrumentalist as the leader of her own jazz band. It shows specific aspects of African American life, such as the role of the barbershop, and makes New York City look both realistic and magical. Its deeper story is an examination of what gives us human beings, regardless of race, our unique personalities and special spark to live to the fullest the life that is gifted to us.
The film is both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny, and the voice characterizations by Jamie Foxx as a middle-aged, middle school music teacher and Tina Fey as a disaffected and stubborn new soul resisting being sent to Earth are wonderful. Through their tandem journey to reclaim Joe's life -- cut short by a freak accident -- they both come to gain a powerful appreciation for what it is to exist.
The Pixar animation is stunningly detailed in the Earth-set sequences, especially the work showing Joe's piano playing. It calls to mind the work done on The Secret Life Of Pets, where city life is charmingly delineated. The studio consulted with several musicians, including Grammy winners Terri Lyne Carrington and Herbie Hancock, and photographed pianist Jon Batiste, who also contributed music, to get the images just right. The film also employs alternate animation styles incorporating line drawings and amorphous shapes and colors to depict the alternative plane where souls are launched and recycled.
It's a delightful, refreshing, and thought-provoking film worth checking out over and over again.
2. Sylvie's Love (2020)
Written, directed and produced by Eugene Ashe
Starring Tessa Thompson, Nnamdi Asomugha, Ryan Michelle Bathe, Regé-Jean Page, Aja Naomi King, and Eva Longoria
A gentle but affecting story of Black romance in 1960s New York City, this stars Tessa Thompson as music-loving Sylvie, the daughter of a record shop owner and a prominent black etiquette school operator, much like Harlem's trailblazing Ophelia DeVore. Engaged to a soldier fighting overseas in the Korean war, Sylvie is biding her time by watching "I Love Lucy" and helping her father sell records when she meets saxophone player Robert, played by football player turned thespian Nnamdi Asomugha, who also produced.
Sylvie slowly falls for the talented and sexy Robert, who her father has hired to help in the record shop, and despite her engagement to the upstanding, well-connected Lacy, Sylvie gets swept into a romance through a series of dates: picnics in the park, time spent on "tar beach" on the roof with her cousin, and dancing in the jazz clubs Robert frequents. THe film is set in 1960s America, and the audience is aware that prejudice still exists, but Sylvie is able to pursue a career in television production. Once again, jazz is treated as an essential and pivotal art form and a path to success for Robert, whose band is offered a rare opportunity to play an extended gig with his band in Paris.
This type of melodramatic romance -- a love that nearly doesn't happen, blazes into passion, is lost, then found -- has the familiar tropes of classic tearjerking Douglas Sirk films of the 1950s like All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession, where social class and family expectations separate the lovers. Though tempted, Sylvie decides not to accompany Robert to Paris, thus seemingly dooming their relationship. But Sylvie has a secret and makes the choice so as not to tie him down and stall what looks to be a promising musical career.
This plot turn also put me in mind of two French-set musicals of the early 1960s: Fanny, starring Leslie Caron, and the French musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve. In both films, a youthful and passionate romance ends with the young man going off on a compelling mission, and the young woman left to raise the child the man didn't know they had. But unlike those classics, Sylvie's Love gives its heroine a chance to reclaim both her love and a sense of agency in her career.
My friend, jazz artist manager Karen Kennedy put it: "In Sylvie's Love we finally have a Black film that is delightfully mundane - no histrionics, no fights, no maids or slaves. No black children saved/rescued/adopted/elevated by white women or white coaches. No prison story, no ghetto escape, no gang violence, no token Black intellectual, no surprise appearance by the 'articulate and bright' guy. Just straight up excellence with narrative, casting, acting, producing, composing, filming. styling, editing, makeup. Tessa Thompson & #nnamdiasomugha are a slice of real. I feel seen and heard, I feel good. I feel normal."
When a jazz professional heaps praise on a jazz-related story, you have to give it props.
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