Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Rye Lane
2023 · Raine Allen-Miller · Rye Lane on Sightlines
A face fills the screen and the street curves away behind it. That's the first thing you notice in Rye Lane, and then you notice it eighty more times. Raine Allen-Miller shoots much of her debut through a fisheye, so a close-up never arrives alone: behind the person talking there's always a bowed horizon of Peckham, stalls and shutters and a chicken shop sign and somebody's shopping, bending at the edges. You're looking at one face and you cannot get the neighbourhood out of the shot.
The lens is borrowed and Allen-Miller knows it. Wong Kar-wai pressed an extreme wide-angle up against faces in Fallen Angels to turn cramped Hong Kong rooms into pressure chambers, warping two people in a booth into something estranged. The distortion said: these people are alone even here. Allen-Miller takes the identical optic and points it at a couple in daylight in South London who are, slowly and against their own better judgement, falling for each other. Same warp, opposite errand. The bend stops being a symptom of isolation and becomes a kind of greed — it wants more world in the frame, not less. That reversal is her invention, and the whole film is folded into it.
Deleuze is useful here for a specific reason. He argued that the close-up isn't a magnified detail but a different species of image: a face lifted out of cause and effect, holding a feeling that hasn't yet discharged into action. He called it the affection-image, and he noted that cinema usually empties the background to let the feeling come through clean. The fisheye refuses that bargain. It keeps the market in. And because the lens announces itself in every shot, you're never permitted to forget that something is doing the looking — Deleuze's term for an image where you perceive someone perceiving, and feel the camera's presence in the gap, is a dicisign. In Rye Lane the thing standing in that gap is a postcode.
Now the shape. A romantic comedy normally runs on what Deleuze called the movement-image: a situation presses, a character forms a plan, the plan produces a gesture, the gesture resolves the situation. Obstacle, scheme, grand declaration, kiss. Rye Lane keeps every one of those parts and refuses to let any of them drive. There is a scheme involving a nightmare ex; the scheme is mostly a pretext to keep walking. Deleuze had a name for this when it surfaced in postwar cinema — the balade, the trip or stroll that transforms nothing. The characters stop being agents and become walkers, and the film's structure is dictated by roaming rather than plot. Before Sunrise built the modern romance entirely out of this, the walk itself doing the work a plot used to do; Before Sunset squeezed it into one near-real-time afternoon of long tracking takes. Allen-Miller takes the compressed single day wholesale and runs it in eighty-two minutes.
Why does that reading earn its keep, rather than just decorating a romcom with theory? Because it explains the film's strange combination of weightlessness and stakes. Nothing in Peckham is different at the end. No situation has been transformed. What changed happened in talk and in faces, in the slack between one errand and the next — and when the sensory-motor link goes slack, what rushes into the space is time, colour and the face. Most films that discover this find it melancholy. Rye Lane finds it delightful.
The colour is doing real conceptual work too. Deleuze distinguished colour that describes an object from colour that absorbs everything the film feels and hands it back as atmosphere. Chungking Express did that with neon over fast-food counters, making a stall into an emotional weather system. Allen-Miller does it in broad daylight: candy-bright, storybook-saturated, a scheme that has no source in the real light of a South London afternoon. And the choice is polemical, because British cinema has a default palette for these postcodes — grey, handheld, sober, social-realist. That default carries an ethic inherited from Bazin and from documentary: don't design the street, record it, let reality supply the meaning. The fisheye gets into a single frame everything Bazin's deep focus ever wanted, the whole street uncut behind the actor, and then bends and paints it. It keeps the fullness and drops the piety.
Watch the karaoke scene with this in mind. Someone stands up to sing badly in front of strangers. In action terms nothing happens at all. Everything happens on a face: embarrassment gathering, the small muscular decision to continue, then the turn where mortification comes out the other side as grace. Deleuze separated the face that holds one quality still from the face where micro-movements climb toward a threshold and something gives; the second he called a potisign, an icon of power, meaning intensity rather than authority. Karaoke is a potisign machine. It's also a gest in Brecht's sense, which Deleuze took over — a posture that exposes a social relation. To sing in public is to be watched being sincere. The scene's whole argument is that being watched turns out to be survivable.
Behind this sits Spike Lee. Do the Right Thing set one sun-baked, hyper-saturated Black neighbourhood over a single day and let the locale act like a cast member; She's Gotta Have It proved a Black romantic comedy could break its own form open — direct address, formal jokes, a real milieu rendered with obsessive specificity. Deleuze, writing on political cinema, kept returning to a line he took from Klee: the people are missing. He didn't mean nobody's there. He meant a people can lack an image of itself in cinema, and that the filmmaker's job in that case isn't documentation but fabulation — inventing the image that brings the thing into view. A grey palette for Peckham is a claim about what Peckham is. So is a pink one. Rye Lane isn't asking to be represented; it's manufacturing an optic and daring you to argue.
What it did, arriving at Sundance in 2023 from a director out of music videos and advertising, was demonstrate that the walk-and-talk doesn't need Vienna or Paris or a whole art-cinema apparatus to carry its charge — a market street and eighty-two minutes will do, if the lens is willing to commit. Whether that permission gets taken up is still being decided, and that's the open question the film leaves sitting there.
Watch it again and watch the edges. The faces are wonderful, but the film's real argument is in the periphery, curving, refusing to get out of shot.
Concepts in play
- voyage-balade-form — The film's structure is the roam: two twentysomethings talk, wander and scheme across Peckham and Brixton for eighty-two minutes, with the ex-related scheme functioning as a pretext for the walk rather than an action that transforms a situation — the single-day walk-and-talk template taken wholesale from Before Sunrise/Before Sunset.
- affection-image — The fisheye close-up: Allen-Miller shoots much of the film through an extreme wide-angle pressed near the faces, so a feeling registers on a face while the market, shopfronts and street stay bowed inside the same frame instead of being emptied out behind it.
- dicisign — Because the fisheye distorts visibly in nearly every shot, the camera never disappears — we perceive the characters perceiving each other and feel the lens standing between, the optical signature borrowed intact from Fallen Angels' warped two-shots.
- potisign (icon of power) — The karaoke scene, described in the dossier as a small aria of embarrassment transmuted into grace: intensity mounting across a face until it crosses a threshold and turns into something else.
- the-gest — Standing up to sing badly in front of strangers at karaoke — a posture that exposes the social relation of being watched while being sincere, and survives it.
- affective (absorbent) colour — The candy-colored, storybook-saturated palette that soaks the streets of Peckham and Brixton — a heightened colour scheme with no source in the real daylight, explicitly refusing the grey social-realist default British cinema reserves for these postcodes, in the lineage of Chungking Express's candy-bright fast-food stalls as emotional spaces.
- fabulation (legending) — The film's proposition that the Black British romcom can be as formally playful as anything on the festival circuit — inventing a saturated, stylized image of a milieu rather than documenting it, following She's Gotta Have It's stylized, formally broken template and Do the Right Thing's rejection of documentary naturalism.
- people-are-missing — The bold refusal of the grey palette that has long been British cinema's default for these postcodes: the political force of the film runs through the absence of any prior cinematic image for this neighbourhood, which the fisheye and the colour scheme set out to supply.