It seems strange that with the Obamas still in office, we have a film about their love story. However, you quickly get over that you’re basically watching Barack/Michelle fanfic because it’s easy to get swept up in Southside With You’s charm and sweetness.
Michelle Robinson, one of the few African-American lawyers at the Sidley Austin firm in Chicago, agrees to go to a community meeting with her mentee, summer associate Barack Obama. Even though she insists it isn’t a date, they end up spending the whole day together, exploring museums, attending the community meeting and even stopping in to see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing at the local cinema.
In many ways, Richard Tanne’s Southside With You is a lot like Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Both films cover one day and consist of two people walking and talking as they build the chemistry between them. Even though Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers are playing real people, they both strike a nice balance between emulating their real-life personas and making the characters their own. Sumpter in particular is fantastic as Michelle, who we see as a strong, ambitious woman acutely aware of the challenges of being an African-American woman in a mostly white male law firm.
It’s charming to watch these two people get to know one another as they clearly have an attraction and respect for one other. Mostly, we only think of Obama as the serious president, so it’s incredibly fun to see a younger version of him smoking cigarettes, picking up Michelle in his dump of a car, and suavely taking her to a community meeting where he’s speaking – all in an effort to impress. And impress her he does, speaking in a church to local residents about concrete steps they can take to get a community center built. Just as we see a more carefree version of Barack, it’s fun to get a glimpse of Michelle before she was the First Lady. Determined and ambitious, it’s clear she’s always been a force to reckon with and that this couple have always been equals.
At the end of the day, Southside With You is a sweet little film about two people getting to know each other over the course of an afternoon. That those two people end up becoming President and First Lady of the United States is only the icing on the cake.
*This review originally appeared as part of our coverage of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival
