Pretty Red Dress review – Alexandra Burke shines in an all-too-neat look at Black identity

The centrepiece of Dionne Edwards’ debut feature film, Pretty Red Dress, is a spangly, glittery number, sensual and attention-grabbing. As we find out through the film, the dress holds a particular significance to each of our three protagonists, all housed under one roof.

There’s mum Candice (Alexandra Burke), a supermarket manager by day and singer by night. Up for a role as Tina Turner in a West End jukebox musical, the dress represents a bit of star power that helps power her through auditions. There’s dad Travis (Natey Jones), fresh out of prison and struggling to find his place in the world, for whom secretly wearing the dress at home offers escape and possibility. And there’s tomboy daughter Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun), who takes the blame when Travis accidentally rips the dress and who resents the glitzy promise it fails to bring whilst reckoning with her own teenage sexuality.

The performances by all three are excellent, each giving nuanced, lived-in portrayals of their characters. They feel like a complex, multi-layered family, whose lives exist beyond the screen. A former X Factor winner, Burke is particularly excellent in probably the most multi-faceted role: a matriarch keeping the family together, an aspiring star, a woman simply confounded by the directions her partner and her daughter are taking yet willing to grapple with it.

Edwards zeroes in on the performative behaviour the dress seems to inspire (there’s more than a hint of Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance here, also starring a pop star in Mick Jagger and also dealing with gender and sexuality). No wonder that Candice is up for a role as the now-departed Tina – a powerhouse singer known primarily for her renditions of other people’s songs (even if she knew how to pen a tune herself), those songs now covered in a West End production, and here performed by Burke, herself primarily known for renditions of other people’s songs.

It’s mimetic behaviour atop mimetic behaviour: that’s essentially the groundwork behind gender, something Travis starts to explore at home in the dress itself, working against the dominant alpha archetypes that surround him. And again, it’s what Kenisha rebels against with her masculine dress sense and regular scrapping with teenage boys.

So why then is Pretty Red Dress good rather than great? Edwards is a talented director. Up to now she has worked on a series of shorts mixed with the occasional TV gig. Given the innumerable hoops up-and-coming filmmakers have to jump through to get anything interesting funded in the UK, one senses a level of anxiety in the filmmaking that’s also apparent in most first-time feature debuts in this country: it’s as if the film has spent so long in script development workshops, pitch meetings, and on the receiving end of feedback notes, that by the time you get to the set there’s no air left in the room – every shot has been pored over for millions of hours.

The result is a film that engages Big Themes but doesn’t develop them, everything resolving neatly at the end. When you’re dealing with something as ambiguous and intangible as identity – be that sexual, racial, or gendered – that neatness sands off any sharp edges. It’s the curse that’s befallen many debutants of the British film industry of the past 10 years, very few of whom make a follow-up film. We can lay some of the blame at the sharp drop in arts funding over the years, vital for reinvesting in our talent, but that’s not to absolve those who still hold what’s left of the purse strings. We can and should be unleashing talent, not smothering it in development hell, and Pretty Red Dress is as fine an example as any as to the effects of that.

Pretty Red Dress is released in UK cinemas on 16 June.