‘Rye Lane’ Review: A Charming South London Love Story Gives the Rom-Com Genre a Fresh Spin

Take the plot of one in all Richard Linklater’s Earlier than motion pictures, mix it with the eye-popping aesthetic of Wes Anderson, then set it inside the ethnically various, extremely photogenic South London enclave of Peckham, and also you’ll wind up with Rye Lane.

Starring the charismatic pair of David Jonsson (Business) and Vivian Oparah (Teen Spirit) as a would-be couple who spend one lengthy, action-packed day checking one another out across the movie’s titular thoroughfare, Raine Allen-Miller’s fairly addictive function debut is colorfully intelligent and generally laugh-out-loud humorous. However most of all it manages to make an previous story really feel new. This Sundance premiere from Searchlight Footage ought to assist put its gifted first-time director on the map.

We’ve seen it earlier than: the meet-cute of two engaging children on the rebound, the tales of their hellish exes, the flirting and the sidestepping, the anticipation of the primary kiss, the rejection and the inevitable reunion. Allen-Miller, working with a script by Nathan Brion and Tom Melia, consists of all of those elements in Rye Lane, tosses them collectively after which provides her personal particular sauce to provide it simply the best zing.

A part of that comes from the plain charms of her two leads, who convey two very completely different sorts of power to their characters: Johnsson performs Dom, a reserved, sweet-faced mama’s boy who nonetheless lives at house and not too long ago realized that his girlfriend of six years, Gia (Karene Peter), has been two-timing him along with his greatest buddy, Eric (Benjamin Sarprong-Broni). Oparah’s Yas may be very a lot the alternative: outspoken and daring, she lives on her personal and is attempting to make it as a dressing up designer in motion pictures. However she’s had a nasty break-up as effectively and, in contrast to Dom, appears prepared to maneuver on.

Opposites in fact appeal to, and Allen-Miller units the stage from the very first scene — which takes place within the lavatory of an artwork gallery — for a short encounter that can convey Dom and Yas collectively for the following 80 minutes. The movie’s concise operating time is fully justified and there’s barely a wasted second or location, with the director following her two lovebirds by way of the guts and soul of Peckham (plus a short foray to neighboring Brixton), the place they wander round indoor markets and tree-lined blocks, in a vibrant neighborhood crammed with people of African and Caribbean origin.

Shot in Anamorphic widescreen by the gifted Olan Collardy, additionally making his function debut, Rye Lane is filled with the form of colourful frames and zipping lateral or frontal monitoring photographs that Wes Anderson — who’s name-checked within the opening sequence — is thought for. However whereas Anderson’s movies are likely to deal with closed worlds and playful historic anachronisms, Allen-Miller takes that fashion out into the streets, turning a well-known story set in an strange place into one thing extra particular.

There’s additionally way more of a hip-hop vibe at play right here, from the subplot revolving round Yas stealing A Tribe Referred to as Quest’s seminal LP The Low Finish Principle from her pretentious artist ex-boyfriend (Malcolm Atobrah) to an exhilirating karaoke model of Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop” that she and Dom carry out to a whooping crowd.

The comedy in Rye Lane additionally feels recent, particularly the rapid-fire banter Dom and Yas always have interaction in — and for which this Yankee critic may have in all probability used some subtitles. Allen-Miller presents us with two sensible and snarky Londoners for whom taking the piss out of one another is the very best type of courtship, and whereas Dom at first comes throughout because the quiet kind, he proves to be Yas’ equal by way of repartee. It’s their phrases that convey them collectively greater than the rest.

Issues head kind of the place you count on they’d within the finale, which winds up being too cute for its personal good. In that sense, Rye Lane ultimatley stays contained in the field of the style, even when Allen-Miller does a very good job pondering outdoors of it as effectively. It’s extra like she makes use of the style as a template to discover the issues she is aware of and loves: the folks, locations, sight and sounds of a neighborhood she each paperwork and glamorizes on the massive display, remodeling actuality into cheeky fantasy.