I was driving through Berkeley this week, listening to KQED on the radio, when announcer Michelle Henagan started reading a promo for the Amazon Prime movie “Sylvie’s Love.”
“It stars Tessa Thompson and . . . .”
Silence. Once second. Three seconds. Five seconds. Nothing. Had I lost contact with KQED? Did someone at KQED mistakenly pull a plug? Talk about your pregnant pause.
Finally Henagan broke the silence with slowly spoken words that vaguely approximated the name of the male lead in the movie: Nnamdi Asomugha.
Asomugha’s name is a show-stopper of sorts. His challenging surname is pronounced AH-sem-wah, as most Cal football fans know because he was a standout safety for the Golden Bears from 1999 through 2002 and was a team captain as a senior. He then became a two-time All-Pro selection and three-time Pro Bowler in his 13 seasons as an NFL cornerback with the Raiders, Eagles and 49ers. Between 2008 and 2010, many considered him the best cornerback in the NFL.
Now the 39-year-old Asomugha is a movie producer and actor, and his starring role in “Sylvie’s Love” has a chance to make him a household name to folks who don’t follow Cal or the NFL.
San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle had the little man sitting up and clapping in his review, giving it the newspaper’s second-highest rating for a film. And he added this about Asomugha:
As for Asomugha, it came as no surprise that he was a successful football player for years. (He played at Cal and then in the NFL with the Oakland Raiders, the Philadelphia Eagles and the 49ers before retiring in 2013.) He gives Robert a quality of quiet certitude: Even when things aren’t going well for him, even in moments of doubt, he carries with him the physical sureness of someone who knows he is very good at something. He has the ease of knowing he can do something really well that most people can’t do at all.
And the Los Angeles Times' review by Carlos Aguilar said this about Asomugha:
Still, [director Eugene] Ashe bets on the fantastic acting that enthralls with its palpable chemistry, a mix of the stoic and virile flirtatiousness Asomugha brings to his talented character and the hard-earned determination of Thompson’s Sylvie, who goes from housewife to television producer.
Not every critic was as kind, as this lukewarm assessment by Al Alexander of the Harrisburg, Pa., Patriot-News attests:
That includes Asomugha, one of the film’s producers, whose acting skills aren’t nearly as fluent as his shutdown of the NFL’s best wide receivers. To say his readings are clunky is being generous. But God is he a stud; and for the film’s target female audience, Asomugha more than fits the sexual fantasy bill.
To his credit, he also sells his character’s joys of sax in convincing musical performances overdubbed by dexterous pros.
The movie is the story of a love affair that takes place in a seven-year span between 1957 and 1963, the years when the romantic melodramas of Douglas Sirk became popular. There is one basic difference in this film – the lovers are Black, a portrayal that simply did not exist in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.
The movie gives a dedication at the end: “To Diahann, Nancy, and Doris” -- an homage to Diahann Carroll, Nancy Wilson and Doris Day, who were stars of this kind of movie during that era 60 years ago.
However, to Cal alumni, the most intriguing aspect of the movie’s release may have been Asomugha’s quotes in a San Francisco Chronicle story written by G. Allen Johnson and posted this week:
You might be surprised what he considers “the best four years of my life.”
“There was no experience like going to college at UC Berkeley,” Asomugha (pronounced AH-sem-wah) said during a video chat with The Chronicle. “There was nothing like it. … Just how much you grow being in Berkeley in general, and in the Bay Area, next to San Francisco, next to Oakland. Just one of my favorite times ever.”
Of course, he was a football star there, a good enough cornerback to be drafted by the Oakland Raiders in the first round of the 2003 NFL draft. But that’s not his most lasting memory.
“Because we were so underrepresented on campus as Black people, we had this thing called Black Wednesday, where all of the Black students on campus would get together and have, like, a little party in the middle of campus — a picnic, for example,” he recalls. “That’s the memory that sticks out.”
The film-watching nation may learn how to pronounce Nnamdi Asomugha’s name in the near future.
Here are two YouTube interviews given by Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha:
And you have to appreciate the music in the movie, including this 1958 classic:
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