There’s a wide gap between outright acceptance and outright rejection. And it’s somewhere within that muddled centre that Dionne Edwards has set her directorial debut, Pretty Red Dress, about a husband’s reckoning with what it means to be a man. Edwards’s film is an admirable if somewhat slight attempt to explore how the gender binary harms all. And, more specifically, the rigid boundaries placed on Black masculinity.
Travis (Natey Jones), recently released from prison, has returned to his old life. His wife, Candice (Alexandra Burke, former X Factor winner and recent West End mainstay) held down the fort and raised their daughter Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun) while he was away. His release gives her a chance to pursue her own desires, her heart dead-set on the starring role in a musical based on the life of Tina Turner (who died last month).
She splurges on a beaded, blood-red dress to add a little extra shimmy to her rendition of “Proud Mary”. But Travis feels struck by an uneasiness. The dress, hung in its closet, calls out to him. When the house is empty, he tries it on. When he rests his body between those layers of silk, he’s able to unburden himself of all the things society has demanded from him but which he’s never offered to give.
Meanwhile, Kenisha’s been repeatedly suspended from school. It’s a convenient distraction from her secretive crush on another girl. Candice, though she’d rebuff any accusation of homophobia, is also clearly someone who both husband and daughter feel the need to hide away from. You can feel all those unspoken words in the air, a thick cloud of shame inside an otherwise amenable home.
Pretty Red Dress reaches out gently to a few untouched corners of British film – not only in how it tackles gendered expectations, but in how it finds in Candice neither hero nor villain. Instead she’s a woman who’s yet to face up to the prejudices she’s been fed her entire life. The film is refreshing, too, in how it deals with sex. The way Travis and Candice experiment with dominance and roleplay in the bedroom is clumsy but sincere (and features perhaps the most wholesome utterance of “I’m your little b****” on film).
But what could be truly radical here feels diluted by the film’s more practical efforts to market itself as feel-good fare – a second coming of Kinky Boots, if you will. Pretty Red Dress’s titular frock is treated as the beginning and end of all gender exploration; the single barrier to be leapt over to achieve spiritual liberation. It’s all a bit simplistic, just one way to externalise all the beautifully knotty and even contradictory ways that Travis views himself.
Still, Edwards has shown real confidence with her camera, in how seamlessly her scenes blend from reality and into the quasi-musical space inside Travis and Candice’s heads. Burke has also made one of the smarter music-to-movies leaps in recent history, with a role that allows her – A Star Is Born-style – to strip back the glamorous excesses of pop music and show us all that twinkly-eyed radiance that denotes true stardom. And Jones, one of the film’s strongest elements, brings an unforced, delicate vulnerability to Travis. It only takes him a single line to nail the modest but cathartic appeal of Pretty Red Dress: “I just like being pretty sometimes.”
Dir: Dionne Edwards. Starring: Natey Jones, Alexandra Burke, Temilola Olatunbosun. 15, 110 minutes.
‘Pretty Red Dress’ is in cinemas from 16 June
