Barack and Michelle’s first date, charmingly imagined
Southside with You 12A cert, 84 mins. Dir Richard Tanne Starring Parker Sawyers, Tika Sumpter, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Phillip Edward Van Lear.
Being the leader of the free world has never looked like a walk in the park, but Richard Tanne’s Southside with You turns a walk in the park into a dry run for just that. This clear-eyed and compulsively charming romantic comedy gives a semi-fictional account of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date in Chicago, 1989 – an event described in undramatic terms by the outgoing US President in his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope as just a trip to the cinema to see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and a shared ice-cream. But here it’s imbued with the eye-catching lustre of momentousness-in-waiting.
Southside with You all but begs you to unpick every line and gesture for echoes of the future, and it’s to firsttime writer-director Tanne’s credit – and his perfectly chosen leads, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter – that the film not only withstands but thrives under such scrutiny.
As a romance, we know where this is going. (Although the same could be said of almost every romantic film ever made.) But as a multi-faceted character study – of a couple, a nation, a racial identity – there are surprises around every corner.
For instance, the film opens on Michelle (Sumpter), rather than her would-be wooer – getting dressed, fixing her hair, and generally going to “an awful lot of trouble for just another smooth talker”, as her mother (Vanessa Bell) drily observes. From the start, to coin a topical slogan, we’re with her – which positions Barack (Sawyers) as the unknown quantity. Accordingly, when Tanne cuts to him relaxing in an armchair, drawing peckishly on a cigarette, there’s less to go on. Or there is until Sawyers deploys a certain look – a down-turned half-frown, head tipped slightly back – that’s such an unmistakable Obama Manoeuvre, the character immediately flashes to life.
Southside with You feels nothing like an ordinary political biopic: it shares far more movie DNA with Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s great romantic-comic wander through Vienna that seems to stumble over a new big truth on every other cobblestone.
Take the community meeting in a church that serves as the film’s dramatic centrepiece. “Where their needs align with our needs, that’s where things get done,” Barack offers while pitching a scheme to win over developers to the building of a new community centre. Here is Obama the pragmatist, the careful progress-maker, the broker of compromise in action. (Those skills come in equally useful later on, in a scene crackling with crossed perspectives, in which a middle-aged, white partner at Michelle and Barack’s law firm quizzes them about the Spike Lee film.)
It’s that central community centre sequence in which Barack wins over Michelle, and theoretically Southside with You’s audience while he’s at it. And while the blunt idea – a small speech becomes a stirring treatise on America’s baked-in problems and promise – has the tawny glow of Hollywood-grown corn, its execution hums with sincerity.
Only the kind of die-hard Obama sceptic, who’d never watch this film in 1,000 years anyway, could fail to be just a little impressed – which goes for the film as a whole, too. It’s far from hagiography, but it’s unmistakably a love story.
‘As a romance, we know where this is going. As a study of a couple, a nation, a racial identity – we don’t’