This feisty, uplifting Brit pic arrives in UK cinemas just weeks after the announcement of the death of Tina Turner – an indomitable figure who serves as an inspirational role model for at least one of the film’s key characters. Indeed, there’s more than a hint of the great soul singer’s spirit in the very likable and slyly subversive feature debut from writer-director Dionne Edwards. Like Turner, Pretty Red Dress is both playful and defiant, swept along on a tide of toe-tapping tunes that tug at the heartstrings, yet unafraid to face up to complex personal issues while still maintaining its solidly mainstream appeal.
Rising star Natey Jones puts an enticing twist on performative machismo as Travis, a young man whom we meet at the end of a spell in prison. Waiting for him is partner Candice, played with understated flair by X Factor winner turned chart-topper and star of stage and screen Alexandra Burke. A diehard Tina fan, Candice is facing a dream role – an opportunity to audition for the lead in a West End show about her idol. Travis wants them to pick up where they left off before his incarceration; to re-establish himself as the man of the house. But relations with their daughter Kenisha (talented screen newcomer Temilola Olatunbosun) have become strained as she deals with the emotional uncertainties of adolescence.
While shopping for something eye-catching to wear for the audition, Candice comes upon the titular red dress – a tassled garment, as dazzling as it is expensive. Yet when she asks the storekeeper if he can hold the garment back for a month, Edwards focuses our attention on Travis’s face, across which a series of conflicting emotions dance. Is he anxious because they cannot afford such a pricey item? Does he want to buy the dress anyway, in order to prove his love for Candice? Or is there something else that Travis cannot admit, even to himself?
Edwards describes her film as being “centred around emotion, namely shame”, and says that she wanted to ask: “What are the costs of suppressing the deepest parts of ourselves?” Pretty Red Dress certainly does a convincing job of presenting a trio of characters all caught between how they see themselves and how they are seen by the world. A scene in which Candice rages at Kenisha for keeping secrets from her says more about the pent-up frustrations Candice feels about her own situation than it does about her relationship with her daughter. Equally, Travis’s own explosions of anger are triggered by his terror of being found out – a fear so powerful that he would rather ask his daughter to lie about how a dress got damaged than simply admit the truth.
More significant is Edwards’s description of the red dress as a “fantastical catalyst”, a phrase that evokes an air of fable-like magic that is central to her film’s spell. Imagine, if you can, the anarchic spirit of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot crossed with the incantatory edge of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric, another film in which a red dress moves transformatively from character to character. As with Raine Allen-Miller’s recent romcom hit Rye Lane, the fact that the drama of Pretty Red Dress plays out amid familiar south London locales keeps its feet planted firmly on the ground, but that doesn’t stop these characters from having their heads in the clouds – clouds of desire, identity, fantasy and (of course) music.
With Johannes Radebe, one of the stars of Strictly Come Dancing’s professional cast, serving as choreographer and movement director, Pretty Red Dress teeters frequently on the brink of becoming a full-blown musical – a genre in which the dividing line between what is real and imagined is regularly traversed through the power of song. Whether it’s Burke singing Tina to just an audition piano, or a sequence in which the finished stage show comes to fully orchestrated life, Pretty Red Dress revels in the power of music to elevate the everyday; to connect us with our emotional lives, reminding us that while things may not always be harmonious, it is possible to dance to different beats without losing your footing.
