‘Pretty Red Dress’: London Review

Dir/scr: Dionne Edwards. UK. 2022. 110 mins.

Dionne Edwards packs a lot into her directorial debut, with the result that there’s a lot here for a lot of audiences in the smashing, sexy Pretty Red Dress. Like her leading man, the writer-director dares to be different – and only joy can result in following that goal. Very British and proudly Black, Edwards’ film juggles tones and formats we’ve never seen put together before and it’s a pleasure to see a first-timer flex her muscles in a part-musical, wholly dramatic story of a recently-released prisoner who takes a shine to his partner’s micro red frock. 

Natey Jones is a revelation and this performance is awards-level, when the time comes

The film, assisted by the Sundance lab, is a daring gamble. The lead actor, Natey Jones, is unknown. The musical diva that is Alexandra Burke is untried in a major dramatic role. And completing this struggling South London family as their grumpy teenager, Temilola Olatunbosun is also a newcomer. But, with the spirit of Tina Turner – and several of her numbers – guiding this film, Edwards targets the gulf between fantasy and tough, bitter reality in a way that should get some under-served UK audiences (Black/LGBTQ+) on their feet, and more besides.

Edwards directly addresses the macho culture amongst Black men which makes even the idea of cross-dressing unthinkable. But she’s also placing it in the context of proud lives that haven’t worked out: a drug-dealing dad who comes out of prison trying to go clean, and the glamorous, sexy mother who works at a supermarket checkout and whose dreams of starring in a West End musical are suddenly revived. There’s a constant threat here to their security, and a lidded rage that surges inside and between the reunited couple Travis (Jones) and Candice (Burke), as 14-year-old Kenisha (Olatunbosun) looks on, expressing her own anger at school.

That, however, makes Pretty Red Dress sound bleak, and this film is anything but. It can be funny; Travis’s insufferable older brother Clive (Rolan Bell) is a pompous monster who is amusing, until he’s not, and their extended family dynamic is well drawn with short strokes. Kenisha’s monosyllabic teenager is so apt, she can be laugh-out-loud funny. Candice’s wild rants veer between eye-rolling amusement and outright anxiety as to what she’ll say next. And Travis’s dalliance with the titular bugle-beaded outfit is a tour-de-force in dramatic tension — apart from the fact that his super-buff post-prison physique and ankle tag will make it a tight fit, he also needs to find a lock for that bedroom door given Kenisha is being suspended from school every second day.

Edwards, DoP Adam Scarth and production designer Phoebe Platman find a seductiveness in this every-day council block life, keyed by the red sequins and Candice’s peachy parade of outfits. There’s a fantasy element here, led by the Tina Turner numbers, that shimmies its way into the apartment. (After all, how can a supermarket cashier and a bus boy afford to run an Audi, unless it’s a leftover from his DJ-and-drug-dealing days; £279 for a pretty red dress is a lot of £8.50 hours.) Candice has lost her confidence, so she builds it from the outside where she’s sexy and shiny and hard as her nails. Inside, though, her self-belief is shaken further by Travis’s sudden inability to function sexually. But Travis, the ex-prisoner forced through one humiliation after another, has a hard, hard road to follow, inexorably drawn to becoming his true self, no matter the cost.

With Edwards’ screenplay taking a frank approach to sex between this couple, challenged by Travis’s increased appetite for risk-taking (Abigail Kessel acted as intimacy co-ordinator), both Jones and Burke give honest, unvarnished performances. The way Travis/Jones moves, how he holds himself in and then lets go, brings a physicality that’s believable, while the rawness and honesty of the character’s internal struggle come from the heart.

Chiwetel Ejifor and Paapa Essiedu (Kinky Boots and the short film Femme respectively) have walked part of this path as Black actors dealing with a taboo subject in the community, but this is theatre actor Natey Jones’s first lead role – and it’s a big one. With no significant prior experience in front of the camera, the actor is a revelation and his performance is awards-level, when the time comes. His belief in Travis is such that it should sway audiences into a real understanding of the issues, underneath the dramatic aspects and roller-coaster nature of the character’s narrative arc.

Between the high drama, the joy, the laughs, the songs and the fears in Pretty Red Dress, there’s a moment where Travis literally steps across a threshold and the audience holds its breath with his daring. For Candice too, as she conquers her stagefright to try out for the role of Tina Turner in a scary audition. Dionne Edwards also takes herself over a line with her first film and it’s similarly nerve-wracking to see if she’ll make it. As her debut shows, people can be many things and a film can dare to be different too; with exhilarating results.