Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava is nominally a slice of social realism, set in Bradford near the filmmaker’s native Otley in northern England. Its protagonists are both working-class individuals coping with struggles at home: Ali (Adeel Akhtar), a part-time DJ and full-time landlord, still lives with his estranged wife (Ellora Torchia), while Ava (Claire Rushbrook), an Irish-born teacher, resides in a house that isn’t large enough to comfortably accommodate her many children and grandchildren. These characters, who live paycheck to paycheck, wouldn’t seem out of place in your average kitchen-sink drama, but Barnard’s formalist sense of composition and flair for melodrama prevents the film from tipping into miserablism.
It’s doubtful that a more charismatic and sympathetic landlord than Ali has ever appeared in a work of realist fiction. Popping around his tenants’ homes each morning and goofing off with their kids, he exudes the kookiness of a sitcom character. In an early scene as Ali drives Ava home, a group of belligerent kids throw pebbles at his car, and in the way that he effortlessly defuses the situation by blasting music from his radio and kicking off an impromptu dance party, there’s a sense that he intuitively understands their aimless rage. Ali’s buoyancy might seem twee were it not revealed to be a defense mechanism, as he’s prone to self-loathing and mood swings as a result of his marital separation and the tragedy that sparked it.
Likewise, Ava is a symbol of resilience. She’s clearly enthralled with children, and she almost always has a smile on her face as she makes her way from home, though you get a sense that she might not be able to sustain it were it not for the country and folk music that Ali makes fun of her for liking. Ali & Ava abounds in such granular scrutiny of its characters’ lives. Ava is also very close to her family, but their closeness often resembles something closer to codependency. At least that’s the case with her relationship to her sullen and quick-tempered son, Callum (Shaun Thomas), who’s never gotten over his father’s death and resents even the possibility of Ava dating, despite the chap being old enough to have a child of his own.
Throughout, Barnard shows with vivid human detail how Ava’s life is one of dreams deferred, of academic studies and career paths not taken as a result of becoming a mother at a young age. When alone, Ava almost visibly deflates, and Rushbrook, so expressive without words, makes plain that her character, whether in repose or in action, whether listening to her music or cradling a grandchild, is always contemplating the scars left behind by her ex-husband.
No response to the relationship between Ali and Ava is more volcanic than Callum’s when he first catches them together, which speaks to a prejudice that runs deeper than his grief over his father’s death. And Barnard juxtaposes the obvious racism that informs his backlash against the diversity of working-class life that Barnard captures in no less revealing ways. For one, Callum and his siblings start every morning exercising to Bollywood dance videos. And one of Ava’s Indian friends gets rhetorically lost trying to demonize Ali by saying that all Pakistani men are womanizers while insisting that any similar anti-Indian prejudice is ridiculous.
Like Andrea Arnold, Barnard has a gift for finding truth and beauty in the everyday. In one shot, she frames Ali through a stained-glass wall in a kitchen, making him seem like an icon in a church window. Elsewhere, when Ava recalls a harrowing moment from her past, her monologue is set to a slow pan across the cityscape of Bradford that’s shot in soft focus, building lights transformed into smudges of colors against the black of night. And the film’s sound design is no less rich, from the omnipresence of music throughout to moments in which the characters’ oversize emotions are reflected in a song’s bass groans.
Barnard’s earlier work tends toward the openly arty, such as The Arbor’s blurring of the lines between documentary and drama by placing its subjects within tableaux vivants. If a sense, Ali & Ava is her most straightforward film to date, but its small, bravura flourishes, combined with Barnard’s embrace of people’s contradictions, showcases her uncanny ability to capture the insoluble complexities of life, and in ways that stretch the boundaries of the social realist film.
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