Real (2019): breezy but uneven cycle through working-class romance (Review)

There’s something about bicycles in film, isn’t there? Ever since Vittoria de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, the two-wheeled transport has been used to denote a kind of child’s-eye realism by Ridley Scott (Boy and Bicycle), the Dardenne brothers (The Kid With a Bike) and Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda). Even in the more genre-focused environs of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, the bicycle has stayed true to its cinematic meaning: a kind of wistful, attainable, small-scale escape.

The opening credits of Aki Omoshaybi’s directorial debut Real, out today in UK cinemas, promises a similar experience. Kyle, played by the director, cycles through the back alleys of Portsmouth on a bright, sunny day. The environs are run-down and graffiti-covered but there’s something about the glow of the sun and the glow of Kyle’s smile that transforms them. It sets you up for something breezy and feel-good in a landscape more often used as the backdrop for social-issue melodrama. And it achieves that, for a while.

Kyle runs into Jamie, played by Pippa Bennett-Warner, in a local newsagent. Their meet-cute is modest – he pays for her goods when her card is rejected – but it displays a carefree attitude towards money that is far from either character’s day-to-day reality. Kyle has had to move back in with his mother; her long, cold stare at him as he smokes a cigarette is a wonderfully economic picture of uneasy co-habitation. Jamie, meanwhile, is a single parent putting on a power-dressed facade. Her initial fear that Kyle will be put off by her child is overturned delightfully quickly, but both leads have bigger problems looming in their lives.

Twelve years since the economic crash and with a sequel on the way, it still feels surprising when a film admits a young man might be living with his mother because the housing market is completely insane. The ‘mumblecore’ cycle of the late 2000s and early 2010s was insulated enough from the real world to believe such living arrangements were always caused by the son’s immaturity, a strangely conservative attitude for an allegedly alternative movement. Kyle does have a certain playful, boyish humour, but this might be symptom, not cause: returning to his childhood living arrangements has caused him to become child-like again. And in any case, Jamie, who’s been defined by her responsibilities for too long, finds this aspect of his personality charming.

So do we, for a while, until the skeletons in his closet start rattling. At just 76 minutes, Real isn’t long enough to properly process its third-act shift into melodrama. Even if it had an extra 15-20 minutes, though, it would still have been hard not to wish it had stuck to the promise of that early bicycle ride: a film that doesn’t ignore the hardships of working-class life, but transcends them instead. As it is, the most consistently strong aspect is Bennett-Warner’s excellent performance. Her career has already spanned the distance between Johnny English Strikes Again to playing Cordelia to Derek Jacobi’s Lear; more recently she’s been on TV in the Windrush drama Sitting in Limbo. This is as much of a showcase for her talent as that last title, and it’s also a role where her race – and Omoshaybi’s – is not a factor in the drama. You’re allowed to notice that this is not the kind of story British cinema normally assigns to working-class black characters, but that doesn’t define how the film develops.

Real is the kind of British film that often gets dismissed as “televisual” – strangely, usually by the same people who are currently boring us to death explaining how television is so much more cinematic these days. While I was agnostic about the film’s visual appeal, defined by Michael Edo Keane’s overly handheld camera, that criticism still seems unfair. If stories like this remind you of soap operas, is that because of its deficiencies as cinema, or is it because soap operas are still the only pieces of popular media that routinely show allow working-class BAME characters flirting and fall in love?

This is, admittedly, too low-key an appeal to go up against the reversing juggernaut of Tenet in cinemas. Its BFI funding suggests it will eventually find its audience alongside BFI Player stalwarts like Campbell X’s Stud Life and Hong Khaou’s (much more accomplished) Lilting – modest but purposeful films whose key promise is to do right by an oft-overlooked section of society.

Thanks for reading our review of Real (2019)

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