A pair of wonderfully winning performances from Claire Rushbrook and Adeel Akhtar lie at the heart of this unexpectedly warm and typically compelling drama from British writer-director Clio Barnard. Described by its creator as a love story about two people who are “a catalyst for change in each other’s lives”, it’s a heartfelt piece that marries the poetic grit of Barnard’s 2013 film The Selfish Giant with something resembling a later-life Romeo and Juliet romance – a fable grounded in reality. Playing out over the course of a lunar month, and drawing inspiration from real-life characters whom Barnard met while filming her previous features, Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.
Bafta-nominated for his performance, Akhtar is Ali, a Bradford-based British Asian who is nominally a landlord, but who seems more like a benignly eccentric uncle. A big kid at heart, Ali has a youthful soul that seems to give him an affinity with the various children he encounters. In a lovely early scene, we see him persuading Sofia (Ariana Bodorova), the young daughter of one of his tenants, to go to school by offering to carry her on his shoulders – a goofy solution that works wonders. Later, Ali wins over a group of stone-throwing schoolchildren by turning up the stereo in his car, encouraging them to sing and dance along to the sounds of local Holme Wood hero MC Innes. It’s a bravura sequence, beautifully balanced on the knife-edge between choreography and chaos, conjuring a spontaneous sense of joy.
Ali has long harboured his own DJ dreams, storing vinyl and turntables in the downstairs den to which he has retreated since his marriage to Runa (Ellora Torchia) collapsed. Now they are “separated – we live in the same house, but separately” – a heartbreaking situation which Ali has yet to confess to his family. As for Ava (Rushbrook), she’s a classroom assistant of proud Irish descent whose children and grandchildren are all around her. While Ali (who meets Ava while picking up Sofia from school) listens to dance beats, Ava loves country and folk, a discovery that prompts a hilariously deadpan car-bound exchange between the pair.
Back at Ava’s house, Ali instigates a headphone disco that switches between the sounds of Sylvan Esso’s Radio and Karen Dalton’s Something on Your Mind, recalling a key scene from François Ozon’s Summer of 85 which itself harked back to an intimate musical moment from Claude Pinoteau’s La Boum. Miraculously, this contrapuntal sequence then segues into the unifying sound of the Specials’ (Dawning of a) New Era, with Ali and Ava’s sofa-dancing rudely interrupted by the arrival of Ava’s overprotective son Callum (The Selfish Giant’s Shaun Thomas) brandishing a sword.
All these tonal shifts are executed with a naturalistic elan that disguises the complexities of the film, allowing its potentially jarring gear-changes to feel wholly organic. Appropriately, Ali & Ava also marks an organic evolution in Barnard’s film-making, striking a celebratory tone that feels like a revelation. While The Arbor and The Selfish Giant both raised important issues about inequality and marginalisation, Ali & Ava manages to retain that sense of sturdy realism while also serving as an ode to the beauty of Bradford, and the indomitability of its inhabitants. Yes, there is dark material here, nowhere more so than in Ava’s soft-spoken recollections of years of domestic violence, or in Callum’s anguished inheritance of anger issues, epitomised by the boots that have been passed from father to son. But if the film has a message, it’s about climbing down from confrontation, a theme subtly dramatised in a subplot involving a piece of playground apparatus, and the dawning bravery of a child learning to fit in with her peers.
Along with Akhtar’s best actor nomination, Ali & Ava is also up for outstanding British film at the Baftas next Sunday, in which category it will compete with the likes of Aleem Khan’s After Love, Rebecca Hall’s Passing and Philip Barantini’s Boiling Point. On that evidence, the much-maligned British film industry is in robustly diverse form.
