Ali & Ava (2021)

Directed by: Clio Barnard | 95 minutes | drama | Actors: Adeel Akhtar, Claire Rushbrook, Ellora Torchia, Shaun Thomas, Natalie Gavin, Mona Goodwin, Krupa Pattani, Vinny Dhillon, Tasha Connor, Macy Shackleton, Ariana Bodorova, Sarlota Nagyova, Sienna Afsar, Uzair Ali, Abid Yaqoob, Rashid Hussain, Kamal Kaan

The romantic drama ‘Ali & Ava’ is incredibly invigorating. The focus is on two generous people from the English factory town of Bradford who are not going through the easiest period of their lives. Landlord Ali (Adeel Akhtarm) is trapped in a failed marriage and teaching assistant and single mother Ava (Claire Rushbrook) is recovering from a previous relationship. Unexpectedly, the two positivos bump into each other. No, it’s not a premise for a Ken Loach or Mike Leigh doom drama. Director Clio Barnard is anything but easy to catch and comes up with a kind of ‘Licorice Pizza’ (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021) about the slums of Bradford in terms of energy. A cinematic love letter against the tide.

The couple’s first connection expresses itself in listening to almost opposite music tastes. Ali adores British punk and hip-hop, Ava prefers to hum to country and folk. Despite this big difference in taste, what music does to people remains inexplicable. The film feeds the idea that Ava and Ali sense each other at a distance through their respective favorite music. Although gooey, it has some sort of transcendental function to the story, and the rousing soundtrack adds a pinch of magical realism to the raw drama.

Besides the passion, Barnard’s film does not hide the problems of Ali and Ava. At Ali, the excess baggage consists mainly of family expectations. He does not dare to tell that his marriage is completely extinguished and to keep up appearances a lot of lies are being told. For Ava, it is her offspring who bring both joy and burden. For example, her teenage son, himself just a father, is not at all happy with the new boyfriend. Moreover, in their convergence you can see the impact of different ethnic identities in Bradford. However, like Ava and Ali’s passion for each other, the film is unafraid of complex situations and may be just unruly love able to settle stubborn contradictions.

In her oeuvre, director Barnard likes to challenge herself with sharply contrasting elements. For example, ‘The Arbor’ (2010) is a staged documentary about playwright Andrea Dunbar who lives in a notorious Bradford slum. It’s not much different for ‘Ali & Ava’. It tries to unite sensitive romance and harsh social drama, also known as Kitchen sink realism in England. Largely and partly it succeeds in this. And while ‘Ali & Ava’ is clearly related to Ken Loach’s films, it also feels like an optimistic antithesis to his social-realist oeuvre, in which almost every film is an indictment of the status quo in England. Yet the question remains whether all the problems in ‘Ali & Ava’ are not too easily covered up with the cloak of love. The open ending says it all.