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.
