A review of the new South London rom-com “Rye Lane”
We all remember how “Notting Hill” (1999) was a rom-com that failed utterly to reflect the ethnic diversity of London, but the British rom-com is changing.Hot on the heels of “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” which features a lead character of Pakistani heritage (plus a segment in Lahore), we have “Rye Lane” in which the lead characters and most of the support characters are Black British and almost all the location shooting is in the Peckham and Brixton districts of South London.
This is the directorial debut of Raine Allen-Miller, a light-coloured Black Londoner who has made a point of casting dark-skinned Black actors in the lead roles. So we have David Jonsson as Dom and Vivian Oparah as Yas, two young South Londoners, attempting to get over a relationship break-up, who find themselves walking around their neighbourhoods for the day talking about all sorts of subjects in a style reminiscent of the Richard Linklater movie “Before Sunset”. Both stars are appealing and Oparah shows particular talent.
The location shooting is colourful, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, and the cinematography is quirky with lots of wide-angle bendy sequences. The narrative follows the traditional romcom pattern of attraction, break-up, reconciliation, but the final segment of this triptych is surprisingly short, as if this low-budget film had suddenly spent all its funding.
In fact, the work as a whole is shorter than most contemporary movies at just 82 minutes, but this is no bad thing. These days too many films are too long and, in this case, the script does not have enough punch to take us along for much longer.
Rye Lane is in the London Borough of Southwark where I live and the final sequences in this film were shot around Tate Modern just minutes from my flat. I enjoy rom-coms and I welcome the extra diversity in storytelling. Therefore, I really wanted “Rye Lane” to smash it, but I found it only moderately successful. The script is just not really up to it.