Pretty Red Dress: an unsentimental celebration of self-acceptance

“Don’t be a pussy boy,” Travis (Natey Jones) tells himself as he admires the striking look of a decorative necklace against his throat. Travis has just been released from prison and is trying to settle back into south London life in the flat he shares with his partner Candice (Alexandra Burke) and their teenage daughter Kenisha (Temilola Olatunbosun). 

The adjustment process is challenging, as you might expect. Kenisha doesn’t communicate much and is constantly in trouble at school. Travis, short of work opportunities, finds himself in the awkward situation of working for his big brother Clive (Rolan Bell) at his restaurant, and observing Clive’s somewhat flirtatious dynamic with Candice. Candice herself, meanwhile, has landed an audition for a potentially transformative opportunity, playing Tina Turner in a West End musical, but feels frustrated by the responsibilities of caring for both Travis and Kenisha. 

Then there’s the matter of the necklace – or, more broadly speaking, Travis’s secret interest in femme glamour, trying out looks behind closed doors using Candice’s jewellery, make-up, wigs and clothes. The film takes its title from a pretty red dress the couple find in a vintage shop. Travis buys it, ostensibly for Candice’s audition, though it soon becomes evident that he has taken a shine to it himself. As events progress, the dress becomes an object of identification for Kenisha too, though in more convoluted ways that spark both new conflicts and new understandings.

In their feature debut, writer-director Dionne Edwards uses the garment’s impact as a device to explore this family’s fraught dynamics and the complex web of secrecy, shame, pride, guilt, frustration and desire that the dress comes to stand for. For Travis, its allure represents a kind of gender trouble that he initially doesn’t know what to do with, conjuring at once a vision of a self in which he takes more joy and assurance and also a challenge to his conventional masculinity that seems to jeopardise his standing in the eyes of his family, his community and himself. Jones brings a watchful sensitivity to the role, befitting Travis’s often passive dramatic position as he tentatively explores who he might in fact be.

For Candice, the dress is an aspirational emblem of potential stardom, a portal to a life of success instead of vexation, where her talents are recognised and rewarded. Burke expresses these aspects potently: as well as delivering several strong musical numbers, the performer’s own track record on TV talent competition The X Factor has a certain overlap with the gruelling audition process to which Candice is subjected. Olatunbosun, meanwhile, gives a quietly captivating performance, with Kenisha struggling to keep track of Travis and Candice’s volatile relationship as well as finding a path to understanding gender and sexuality that is also unconventional in important respects.

Edwards’s film is something of a slow burn, taking its time to establish character and environment before its narrative crisis kicks in. The screenplay deftly balances the competing desires, vulnerabilities and insensitivities of its three leads, and is unafraid to let Travis seem weak or Candice intolerant. At times, Candice’s conflicting, sometimes contradictory feelings around Travis’s gender presentation might feel as confusing to audiences as they do to him, though this is not to say such complexities are unrealistic in situations where desire and repulsion, acceptance and rejection can come into play in confusingly overlapping ways. It’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t seek to flatten these challenges, offering excruciating confrontations between its main characters in which blame is not simple to apportion.

The use of music is key here, with Motown casting a long shadow, not only underpinning Candice’s creative and professional hopes but also Travis’s journey of self-discovery. Poignantly, a song of self-empowerment starts as rousing support for his experiments in femme presentation but, within the same scene, turns to bitter irony when it continues playing after he is traumatically discovered.

The family’s Black identity is framed with nuance too, weaving in carefully observed notes around family relationships, local community and the ways in which Candice in particular is shown to be vulnerable to racialised dynamics, whether having to present her Tina Turner to an all-white audition panel or facing quixotic police power in her own home. Travis’s gradual moves toward self-acceptance, meanwhile, are framed as a matter of internal subjectivity and expression that can be understood in plain terms that throw bigotry into relief: “I just like being a bit pretty sometimes.” 

 ► Pretty Red Dress arrives in UK cinemas 16 June.