Ali and Ava (UK 2021)

Clio Barnard’s fourth feature opened in the UK in March 2022 when I was still wary of returning to the cinema after COVID, especially for a film which I expected to attract a significant audience in Bradford. I’d seen the director’s previous two Bradford-set films and I certainly wanted to see the third but I’d had some doubts about both of the first two while recognising Barnard’s skill and creative imagination. I don’t know about anybody else but I’m always a little wary when national reviewers/critics write about films set in the place where I live/work and this film was enthusiastically reviewed by the usual suspects. Clio Barnard was brought up in Otley, but after university in Newcastle and Dundee she worked for some time out of Kent and now lives in London, I think? She came back to West Yorkshire to make The Arbor released in 2010 and became so interested in Bradford as a place to make films that she returned to make The Selfish Giant in 2013 and again for Ali and Ava in 2020. The authenticity of Barnard’s Bradford films is partly based on the workshops she holds with local people which then produce the characters for the story, in this case ‘Ali’ and ‘Ava’. But the actors who play them don’t have to have been in the workshops or necessarily be from West Yorkshire.

The idea behind the story is to explore the cultural mixing necessary to make the romance work, not necessarily the mixing associated with different ethnic identities, but more importantly in this case with musical tastes. Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a part-time DJ into all kinds of music but mostly rap, hip-hop, electro etc. (don’t quote me on this, I don’t know much about the music DJs play these days). He lives with his wife, but the couple are in the process of separating. Runa (Ellora Torchia) is taking a degree course as a mature student. Ali also takes seriously his responsibility as a landlord. He is described in one review as a ‘property manager’ which is a bit of a stretch. I don’t think it is that unusual for South Asian families to own several houses in the same street. Ali’s mother lives next door and the extended family are all local. He has let a third house to a Slovakian family. He sometimes take Sofia, the small daughter of the family to primary school or picks her up after school. This is how he meets Ava (Claire Rushbrook) who is a teaching assistant at the school. He offers her a lift home because it’s raining, not perhaps realising that she lives south-east of the city centre in Holme Wood which includes a large, mainly low level public housing estate with green spaces. ‘Bradford BD4’ also featured in The Selfish Giant and in 2016, a local newspaper story reported that some taxi firms were boycotting the district because of attacks on drivers. Barnard references this in the dialogue between Ali and Ava, but he laughs it off.

We never find out precisely where Ali lives but it appears to be somewhere in the northern part of the city (i.e. the city proper, not the north of the metropolitan district). As in previous films, Barnard makes sure that the backgrounds of shots are blurred or framed to ignore obvious landmarks. This is irritating, but I think she wants us to focus on the personal relationships. On the other hand she does use two iconic Bradford locations, the Waterstones bookshop inside the historic Wool Exchange and Undercliffe Cemetery, the Gothic monument to the great and the good of 19th century Bradford. The cemetery is high up above Bradford, a city surrounded by hills and it also features in one of Bradford’s most famous films, Billy Liar (1963). 

As Ali and Ava get to know each other, it is clear that they each have back stories which may well have a bearing on the success of their relationship. It could be argued that overcoming the threat that these back stories, family feuds and mistrust represents the happy ending to a romance story. On the other hand, some issues aren’t resolved. Perhaps the romance is built on the charisma of the two central characters created by Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook who are both very good. The idea of a clash of musical tastes is interesting and Barnard gets good milage out of it, but again it seems to work more for Ava than for Ali – or rather he does most of the work in meeting her tastes.

I should explain that I watched the film once on iPlayer on my TV and then again on my computer. I couldn’t get the subtitles to work on TV and I did find the film a little disappointing. But when I did get the subtitles working on my computer, I found I could follow the dialogue and get much more from it. I like too the fact that sometimes the subtitles provide the titles of songs. I was surprised that I didn’t know the singer Sammi Smith, associated with ‘Outlaw Country’ whose 1970 song ‘Saunder’s Ferry Lane’ (1970) is played through Ava’s earphones early in the narrative. Nor was I familiar with the Bob Dylan song ‘Mama, You Been on My Mind’ an out-take from 1964 which plays a significant role when Ali learns to play it. There are several other tracks of more modern music which are interesting in terms of the narrative but don’t have the same resonance for me. My other main issue with the film is that it is literally pretty gloomy. It seems to have been part filmed in Autumn in 2019 (?) in Bradford. The weather is bad and the images struggle for light and vitality. I understand that in post-production there were problems because of lockdown. That might be why the couple take a ‘trip away’ but they simply end up on our local heritage railway, travelling the 5 miles from Keighley to Haworth or Oxenhope. The subsequent ‘holiday moment’ appears to be on Haworth Moor or somewhere close by. I don’t suppose this means much to audiences outside Bradford Met but it puzzles me. I guess I’d like the film to be just as realist and downbeat but the occasional sunny moment wouldn’t go amiss. I like Bradford and I think it has some great qualities and some wonderful attractions. I’m confused as to the way Barnard uses landscape. Bradford Met, the whole district, is great mix of the rural and the densely urban (which the director does explore in The Selfish Giant) but here Ali takes his car out to a hill top, mainly at night at certain times of the moon as his father had done. But that’s as far as a sense of feeling for landscape goes.

I’ve not commented on much of the back stories because I don’t want to spoil the narrative. It’s better to discover more about both Ali and Ava as the narrative unfolds. It is important to think about the narrative as a representation of working-class Bradford though, especially from Ava’s perspective. Barnard’s achievement is perhaps to create a love story that presents a more nuanced view of working-class culture than we often get to see. But will Ava be able to help Ali find a way out of his current family situation? I’d like to see that story.

In the UK Ali and Ava is available on iPlayer for 11 months. It was distributed internationally and should be available on streamers in other territories. My only gripe with its distributors is that they haven’t released more images from the film, just a paltry five or six, mostly focusing on the couple. The trailer below does offer a reasonable summary of how the film, shot by Ole Bratt Birkeland looks: