Adeel Akhtar doesn’t seem to be getting enough sleep. The actor’s face, in this British love story, resembles the site of a chaotic archaeological dig. His co-star, 50-year-old Claire Rushbrook has also been made to look pretty shattered. These are not your average romantic leads. Thanks to their above-average acting, however, you won’t give a monkey’s. In all the ways that count, the characters they play are irresistible.
As with all director/writer Clio Barnard’s previous films, the story is set in West Yorkshire, here Bradford. Pakistani-British Ali (Akhtar) sports a hat that could double as a tea cosy. It makes him look witless, but he doesn’t seem to care. A former DJ, secretly estranged from his much younger wife Runa (Ellora Torchia), he’s cheerful and borderline manic, collecting rent money on behalf of his property-owning parents.
One day, he meets Irish-British Ava (Rushbrook), a teacher’s assistant, single mother and grandmother, who lives in the roughest part of town. Oh yes, and her son, Callum (Shaun Thomas; brilliant, just as he was in Barnard’s The Selfish Giant) used to be a skinhead. Ali loves all music except folk and country. Ava loves folk and country. Surely this romance is doomed?
Barnard’s script is crammed with humour and unexpected details. Ava’s first husband was Indian; her second husband beat her. When drunk, Ava herself can be aggressive. Barnard is re-exploring material she covered in her extraordinary debut The Arbor, a genre-defying portrait of Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. Barnard promotes strong women and multiculturalism, but rarely in a way that’s predictable.
Towards the end, I’ll admit, things get a little neat (Callum’s arc is especially implausible; a traumatised Slovakian school-girl is perhaps rehabiliated with too much ease). But until then, it’s all delightfully tangled.
The soundtrack alone is a source of joy. I’d never heard of “outlaw country” singer Sammi Smith, but her lust-laced lament Saunders Ferry Lane turns a mundane bus trip into a shiver-inducing odyssey. Music and movement are everywhere. Ali bounces on the roof of a car. Later, he and Ava, connected to separate iPods, bounce on her sofa. Ava’s grandchildren bounce there, too. Ava’s possibly bipolar daughter, hoover in hand, practically bounces off the walls.
Barnard’s quirky editing adds so much to the story’s texture. At one point, Ava, with great tenderness, sings a lullaby to Callum’s baby. But because the time-frame is jumbled (the song’s not in sync with the images), we’re taken out of the moment, and nudged into realising this is a far from unique event. Where Ali yearns for a baby and with quiet desperation strokes an empty cot, Ava has been rocking the cradle for most of her adult life. There are no soapy discussions about whether Ali’s need for children will derail the relationship. The film, like its central characters, just takes each day as it comes.
95mins, cert 15
