Review: ‘Southside with You,’ starring Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers

Starring: Tika Sumpter, Parker Sawyers

Directed by Richard Tanne

In the often wonky sub-genre of historical romances, the light-on-its-feet airiness of Southside with You hits like a refreshing breeze of originality. It captures a single moment in time simply, and without overinflating the images and egos of the characters involved. It’s a snapshot of an event looked back on fondly by two people, and in the end it doesn’t matter who the couple involved would turn out to be. They’re just a man and a woman with a tenuous attraction that blooms into something more over the course of a subtly formative afternoon.

The couple in question here is Michelle and Barak Obama, and writer/director Richard Tanne takes viewers back to the time of their first ever date in the summer of 1989. The eventual power couple that (as of the time of this writing) rule the most influential country in the world knew each other prior to their date, though. Princeton educated Chicago native Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) worked as a legal aid lawyer where the Harvard educated Barak (Parker Sawyers) spent their first summer together as a temp. Ostensibly (or so the filmmakers will have us believe for the sake of feel good entertainment), their day together was supposed to entail the two colleagues going to a meeting about the stalled progress of an inner-city community centre. Instead, Barak was so taken by Michelle that he picked her up several hours early for the meeting in hopes that they could get to know each other better.

At first, the professionally minded and optimistic Michelle isn’t really having it, but the big dreaming, but realistically minded Barak persists, leading to the pair closing out their night by taking in drinks and a screening of Spike Lee’s seminal Do the Right Thing. By all accounts, it’s a pretty relaxed and standard first date, almost banal in its small details but rife with historical significance when looking back on it.

Southside with You could have very easily teetered into unsubtle territory, but outside of the aforementioned community meeting where Barak’s charisma and public speaking skills are on full display, Tanne seems wholly unconcerned with mythologizing the pair. More indebted to the works of Richard Linklater and Eric Rohmer, Tanne wants to simply display 80 minutes worth of two people getting to know each other for the first time. One could call it a “meet cute,” but there’s nothing contrived about the circumstances and conversations contained within Tanne’s work.

There’s an immediate hesitancy between blue collared Michelle and the white collar and world weary Barak, but Sumpter and Sawyers immediately prove via their perfectly pitched performances that there’s an undeniable chemistry between the two of them. Their cadence and manner of speaking are on the same level, suggesting a battle of wills and wits that make for perfect first date fodder. Barak asks a heady conversation starter along the lines of asking about pop culture or religion. Michelle volleys back with an answer and a more personal question. Barak answers with a painful, almost wounded honesty.

It’s sweet and honest in its simplicity, and despite an ultra-low budget that can barely mask that the events aren’t actually taking place in the late 80s, Tanne still manages something softly entrancing. It’s hard to capture the magic of what it feels like to first realize that you really like someone a lot, but Tanne, Sumpter, and Sawyers do so simply by not trying to overwork things. Sure, it’s as rose coloured as it is intimate, but there’s nothing wrong with that. In a time when far too many romances feel like they’ve been over-churned on the Nicholas Sparks assembly line of hack writing for housewives, it’s nice to see a film that simply lets characters be themselves instead of having to play into some grander, hokier statement about the nature of love. With a couple as high profile as Michelle and Barak, that would have been easy, so kudos to Southside with You for not taking the path of least resistance and delivering a solid film. It’s a nice film perfect that’s a great cure for the late summer doldrums.

Southside with You opens in Toronto on Friday, August 26, 2016.

Check out the trailer for Southside with You: