How do you deal with the trauma of a messy, romantically-scarring break-up?
Cry in a public unisex toilet block in a “private moment” that’s anything but? Break into your boyfriend’s art-riddled apartment to retrieve an LP that you claim has sentimental value? Or try to pretend everything’s okay when it’s patently not?
All of those techniques and more are employed by Dom (David Jonsson) and Yas (Vivian Oparah) in their attempt to move on with lives that feel curiously becalmed and blisteringly torn apart after relationships they had invested time and effort in – he for 6-and-a-half-years, she for one-and-a-half-years – and which are still figuratively bleeding profusely when they meet one fateful day in the gloriously grounded and luminously hopeful British romantic comedy, Rye Lane (now streaming on Disney+).
Their meet-cute, if you can call it that, takes place when avuncular, chatty, brazenly confident Yas hears Dom, who’s locked himself in as cubicle to cry out yet another blissfully happy social post from his ex Gia (Karene Peter) and BFF since primary school Eric (Benjamin Sarpong-Broni), falling apart emotionally in a way so sobbingly intense it spills out into the communal space.
At an exhibition of arty photographs of the mouth by their mutual pretentiously arty friend Nathan (Simon Manyonda) who hilariously explains his art with “facts” which are anything but but which no one dares dispute, Dom and Yas connect, mainly because, in typical fashion, she glances under the cubicle door, sees what kind of sneakers he’s wearing (pink funky lace-ups) and then strikes up a conservation when she sees him out later in the gallery.
As shy and reticent to engage as Yas is out there, Dom is a successful accountant temporarily back living with his doting mum and dad – he thinks they dote too much but Yas points out there are people, you rightly guess her, who would LOVE that kind of over-protective involvement by their parents – who, three months on from discovering his girlfriend was having sex with his bestie, who is sweet but dumb as the proverbial, is not exactly moving on with life.
By way of highly engaging contrast, Yas looks like the very picture of a moved-on kind person – shooting for a job designing costumes for films, possessed of witty retorts that seem to spring from an at-east, breezy personality that everyone loves (Dom tries to emulate her on a number of occasions on the day they’re together and does not stick to the landing once, poor guy; but not, it should be noted, for want of earnestly trying) and engaged with the world around her which suggests someone who’s made her peace with a painful past and raced giddily into a hopeful future.
But appearance is not everything, despite the cult of social media which proclaims precisely the opposite, and as Dom and Yas’s unexpected day together progresses through lunches, drinks and a backyard BBQ at her ex’s lesbian parents who adore her still (but, of course, they do; you will too, she’s adorable), it emerges that neither has any idea what to do next.
Now you could be forgiven for wondering if any good will come of Yas and Dom meeting up like they do in Rye Lane, who visually burbles with authentic scenes in and around Brixton, London where Rye Lane the place is located, since aren’t they in prime rebound territory?
Surely they are too embroiled in the past – Dom super obviously, Yas far more subtlely, a reality which only emerges when the inevitable rom-com sundering occurs at their end of their magically unexpected extended moment together – to really find each other in the present and craft some sort of meaningfully fun future together?
The chemistry is clearly there, yes, and the back-and-forth repartee is an absolute joy to watch fuelling Rye Lane, which is far more quirky than you might expect, punctuated by memories which come alive before Yas and Dom, allowing to walk into them and interact at will, but can that really be sustained beyond one very special day?
Yaz’s ex Jules (Malcolm Atobrah), who’s somehow found someone in Tabby (Alice Hewkin) even more full of emptily arty phrases and pretentious than he is, confidently and scornfully predicts it will go nowhere, accusing Yas of being the sort of people who subsumes people in her sh*t, but you get the feeling that Yas and Dom may have found someone truly special in each other.
It’s a gloriously good and wittily heartwarming and brutally honest rom-com so a happy ever after ending seems a reasonable expectation?
But then the almost mandatory ripping apart of nascent romantic hopes and dreams takes place, and with such brutal finality as Yas finally confronts her simmering inner emotional demons, that you wonder if Rye Lane is one of those rom-coms that will end in a very European way, fulfilling an expectation, rightly assumed by the pivotal near-to-final act scene, that maybe this is a romantic flash-in-the-pan borne less of mutual attraction, though that’s undeniably there, and more of desperation to cling to desperately longer connection?
The truth is, Rye Lane, gritty and honest though it might be times dressed in decidedly warmly fun and comedically rich quirkiness, is at its heart a rom-com, and that all but demands that things work out happily.
Quite how they do is best left to the watching because it’s a pleasure to immerse yourself in, from the lingering sentimentality of people who clearly LIKE each other to a reunion which is all kinds of big gestures and epic feelings, but be assured this is one of those movies that will leave you feeling like hope and love and a meaningful future are not the stuff of silly longing.
For all of the artfully and expertly romantic fairytale-ness of Rye Lane, and it absolutely nails the giddy joy of meeting and finding yourself instantly head-over-heels for someone in a way that defies logic but which gladdens the heart and sets the soul alight, it feels deliciously and enticingly real, a cosy but emotionally stark, quirky romp into the darkness and pain of romantic loss that dares to imagine what the other road out of it might look like.
Gotta say, it looks pretty damn good and effervescently alive, and with Oparah and Jonsson delivering superbly nuanced performances with beautifully realised characters who in just 82 minutes come forth in ways that make you care a hell of a lot for them, Rye Lane is one of the standout rom-coms of this or any other decade, honest about life but buoyantly hopeful about love and who could want for anything more (beside, perhaps, a Vespa ride through the night-time air of London?)
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