Barack Obama’s date inspires movie

‘Southside with You’ unravels love story of US First Couple.

LOS ANGELES: We’ve heard their playlists, watched them dance together, and now we will see Barack Obama and Michelle Obama on their first date in a film that follows the then future president wooing his future wife over the course of a day.

Southside with You dramatises US president’s first date in the summer of 1989 and sees Michelle, a 25-year-old lawyer from Chicago, going out with Barack, a summer associate at her law firm.

Over the hours they spent together ­— which Michelle initially insisted did not constitute a date — the two attended an Ernie Barnes art exhibition, a community meeting, a screening of Spike Lee’s movie Do The Right Thing, had drinks and ate ice cream as they discussed their lives, ambitions and fears.

“You see in this film that they challenged each other, you know, and they walked in each other’s shoes and that they spoke about their family, and I just think all that stuff is very real and accessible to people,” said actor Tika Sumpter, who plays Michelle. Southside with You takes details that the two have shared about their first date in various interviews and puts into dramatic form the conversations they may have had.

Parker Sawyers, the actor who plays Barack in the film, said he started off with a strong impersonation of the president, but then let the mannerisms and speech inflections of his character come naturally.

The rapport between the two is courteous and playful in the film, as Michelle feistily keeps her date at arm’s length while he uses charm to bring her guard down.

Turning 28 that summer, Barack married Michelle in 1992, three years after their first date.

The African-American community of Chicago’s Southside serves as a backdrop to the story. Michelle gets a glimpse of the future US president’s early leadership skills when he takes her to a community meeting to find a way to build a youth centre.

Later, the two momentarily clasp hands as they watch a harrowing scene in Do The Right Thing, where a black man dies after being placed in a chokehold by a white policeman.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 20^th, 2016.

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