Plenty of couples banter, woo, and fall in love in Chicago, despite the vast majority of American films locating romance elsewhere (most often in New York). But in dramatizing the first date of Barack and Michelle Obama in the summer of 1989, when they were colleagues at a Loop law firm, writer-director Richard Tanne returned to the city where the couple met and, three years later, married. Shot over 15 days last summer, Southside With You showcases a city as photogenic, dynamic, and charming as the lovers themselves.
Constrained by a tight budget, Tanne takes some artistic liberties with exact locations. The Chicago Cultural Center stands in for the Art Institute, and the couple lunch in Douglas Park instead of the museum courtyard. In one touching, if fictional, scene, Barack looks on as Michelle joins a group of black drummers and dancers in the park, their figures mirroring those in Ernie Barnes’s painting The Sugar Shack, which they discussed earlier at the exhibit. At sunset they walk along the lakeshore, not Michigan Avenue, probably because the Magnificent Mile has changed so much since 1989. North-siders will recognize the movie theater as the Music Box, though the couple probably went to the old Hyde Park 1 & 2 (now the Harper Theater). Their fabled first kiss outside a Baskin-Robbins occurs not at the corner of Dorchester and 53rd (the spot has been marked with a commemorative plaque since 2012) but at 53rd and Woodlawn, where the film crew turned a Harold’s Chicken Shack into a Baskin-Robbins for the nighttime scene.
Directed by Richard Tanne
