Film review

  • Ali & Ava

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Clio Barnard (2021)

    Like all three of writer-director Clio Barnard’s previous features, Ali & Ava is set in her native Yorkshire.  Like its more successful predecessors, The Arbor (2010) and The Selfish Giant (2013), this new film is set in and on the outskirts of Bradford.  One of the title characters lives on a rough estate, Holme Wood; most of the houses seen in the course of the film are, whether viewed from the outside or inside, close-set.  The action sometimes moves, however, into more open spaces and the countryside beyond the city.  The look of Ali & Ava thus alternates between unyielding and lyrical, echoing the scheme of The Selfish Giant.  Perhaps to a greater extent than in that film, there’s also a correspondence here between the main visual qualities and those of the story being told, in which music plays an important part.  Clio Barnard may never repeat the formal innovations that gave The Arbor such impact but, of her films since, this latest is the most involving, though also the most dramatically conventional.

    Ava (Claire Rushbrook), fifty-something and of Irish descent, works as a classroom assistant but she’s primarily a mother:  she wears several rings but the one on her wedding finger declares MUM.  She has no partner but her four children and five grandchildren are all close at hand.  As well as her school-age youngest daughter Venice (Macy Shackleton), Ava’s current household also includes her son Callum (Shaun Thomas, who was Swifty in The Selfish Giant), his girlfriend (Tasha Connor) and their baby girl.  Fortyish Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a British Asian landlord who used to be a club DJ and liked it far more than collecting rents for his family’s properties.  He stores vinyl and turntables in the den where he now spends most of his time at home.  He’s married to Runa (Ellora Torchia) but they occupy different parts of the house and his wife intends to move out at the first opportunity.  Runa, who lost a baby, is now doing a university degree and her social life is with fellow students.  Ali hasn’t summoned the courage to tell his traditionalist family that the marriage is over.  What’s more, he’s persuaded Runa to keep up the pretence, on visits to Ali’s mother, that nothing is wrong.  Although he has no children of his own, Ali likes and gets on well with kids.  On his rent-collecting round, a tenant’s daughter, Sofia (Ariana Bodorova), won’t go to school.  Ali changes her mind by carrying her there on his shoulders, to Sofia’s laughing delight.  He first meets Ava when he comes to the school to drive Sofia home, as a favour to her mother.  Since it’s pouring with rain, he offers Ava a lift too.

    There’s one young character who doesn’t like Ali:  just seeing Ava get out of his car is enough to make her son’s hackles rise.  Callum, in his early twenties, may already be a parent himself but he’s mourning his own recently deceased father, Paul, whose fascist insignia decorate his room.  Callum has also inherited paternal bovver boots and a sword, which he brandishes when he finds his mother and Ava dancing on the sofa together.  During that first car journey, Ali asks Ava what kind of music she likes and she says country.  He doesn’t like the sound of that – what else?  Folk, she says.  That’s even worse, he replies, but she’s clearly tickled by his deadpan humour.  In time, Ali will make the effort to get into Bob Dylan in honour of Ava’s tastes (a nicely credible plot thread).  On an early visit to Ava’s house, though, he and she listen through headphones, connected to different iPods, to tracks Ali has put together to suit their respective preferences – until, that is, both selections play The Specials’ ‘(Dawning of a) New Era’.  This triggers the manic sofa dancing that Callum interrupts.  In a later sequence in Holme Wood, Ali wins round a gaggle of stone-throwing schoolkids by turning up his car stereo on a track by local hero MC Innes but Ava’s son is a persistently tougher nut to crack.  Ali tries to make light of the sword incident by referring to Callum (not to his face) as Zorro.  After learning more about his father’s extremism, Ali isn’t joking when he asks Ava, ‘If Paul was here, would he kick my head in?’  The silence in response is eloquent.

    As in her third feature, Dark River (2017), Barnard supplies one of her two main characters with more detail than the other but this time it’s the female lead.  We learn that Paul was also a wife-beater, who habitually ordered Ava to bring him the boots he liked wearing to lay into her.  He abused his stepdaughter, Michelle (Mona Goodwin), Ava’s eldest, for good measure.  A more surprising revelation is that, after she finally split with Paul, Ava decided to change her life and did a degree in criminology (!)  Even allowing that, as Michelle reminds her, Ava has made bad romantic choices in her time, it’s pushing it – and is designed purely to ratchet up domestic racial tension – that Michelle’s father was non-white and his successor a neo-Nazi.

    I wanted more of Ali’s family background, especially in view of the extraordinary secret he’s keeping from them.  A sequence in which his mother (Vinny Dhillon) shows Runa family photographs doesn’t ring true, for one of two reasons.  The way the scene is played gives the impression that Runa has never seen the photos before – hard to believe, given how many family gatherings she must have attended.  If Barnard means to suggest, rather, that the album is regularly brought out then Runa, at least, should somehow signal this, so that we see her reaction is part of the playing along that Ali asks of her.  A persisting problem is that it’s hard to see how their partnership ever worked.  Ali tells Ava that he got to know Runa in his DJ days and first noticed her because she was a great dancer.  You sense this information is supplied mainly to make clear theirs wasn’t an arranged marriage.

    The landscape cinematography – by Ole Bratt Birkeland, who shot The Arbor – is admirable.  Barnard’s choice of handheld camerawork for many indoor sequences is less successful:  the frenetic movement chimes only intermittently with the moods of characters in the frame.   The production design is by Stéphane Collonge, a Frenchman with a fine feel for English locale, whether town or country:  he also designed Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, as well as Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir and its successor.  The odd-couple pairing at the centre of Ali & Ava is its chief strength, though.  The protagonists’ temperamental motors run at very different speeds and Barnard has cast the roles well to realise the contrast.  Ali is hyperactive.  As he tells Ava, he tends to go ‘from zero to seventy’ without pausing for breath; when his car’s stationary, he likes dancing to electro music on the roof rack.  Adeel Akhtar, emotionally nimble and eccentrically witty, is excellent:  he energises the whole film.  Claire Rushbrook’s Ava is altogether slower moving and Rushbrook is a less varied performer but she’s physically just right as a mother figure still hankering after being her own woman.  She has real warmth, especially in her eyes.

    It isn’t the fault of Shaun Thomas that Callum is insuperably problematic.  Barnard may mean us to see him as confused and hurting but that’s not how the character plays out.  It’s a retrospectively effective touch that, before his political leanings are revealed, Callum is seen happily dancing alongside Venice to a Bollyrobics routine they’re watching on television.  But his possessive attitude towards Ava and his hero worship of Paul are a queasy combination.  It’s faintly creepy when Callum sings a duet (‘Dirty Old Town’) with his mother on a family visit to a local bar.  We’re told that he doesn’t know what Paul did to Michelle; we’re not told that Callum was unaware of what Ava suffered at the hands – and feet – of his father.  As Runa, Ellora Torchia can’t rise above her weakly written role.  The more vivid Natalie Gavin is underused as Ava’s bi-polar friend and confidante.

    Ali and Ava’s tentative progress towards sleeping together – which they first do on a secret weekend away together – is well done.  Nervousness about what others might think, and what Callum does think, is compounded by a shared hesitancy deriving from the relationships each has already had.  Ava doesn’t want to make another mistake.  Ali hasn’t stopped loving Runa, though it’s now an unrequited love.  Despite this, the event that causes a rift between Ava and Ali – through a window, she sees him embracing his about-to-be-ex wife – is another element that feels contrived:  in a set-up like this, there has to be a rift in order for it to be healed.  The film does end effectively, though.   It’s pat that Callum, after belatedly learning what Paul did to Michelle, sloughs off his father’s legacy without further ado but his mother’s second thoughts about giving up on Ali are more convincing.  Shortly after they meet, they go one evening to a stretch of ground looking out on the moors above Bradford.  Ali tells Ava he comes to the same spot whenever it’s a new moon, to think about his late father.  It’s that time of the month again.  Ava knows where Ali will be, she joins him there, they look at each other, and that’s it.  The story simply stops, without a sense that the couple’s difficulties are resolved or their future secure.  But Clio Barnard leaves her principals and her audience hoping for the best.

    11 March 2022

  • Hive

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zgjoi

    Blerta Basholli (2021)

    Like Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, writer-director Blerta Basholli’s Hive explores maternity, female independence and unresolved national trauma.  Unlike Almodóvar’s film, Basholli’s debut feature aims for and achieves sustained synergy between these themes.  In 1999 the Kosovan farming village of Krushë e Madhe was the site of an attack by Serbian forces that left 240 local men dead or missing presumed dead.  The latter include Agim, the husband of Hive‘s heroine, Fahrije (Yllka Gashi).  The action begins in 2006, seven years into her life as, in effect but unofficially, a war widow.  Fahrije looks after her and Agim’s two children, her elderly, wheelchair-bound father-in-law, domestic DIY, and her husband’s hive of bees.  The honey she sells is now the family’s sole source of income.  The disappeared of Krushë e Madhe are thought to lie in mass graves whose location the Serbs still refuse to disclose, though human remains sometimes turn up.  In the film’s opening scene Fahrije furtively searches a tented makeshift morgue in the hope and fear of discovering something there to identify her husband.  She then climbs onto the back of a stationary truck that contains white body bags.  She unzips one, glances at what’s inside, and hurriedly zips it closed again.  When a soldier spots Fahrije and shouts that she’s trespassing she walks away.  The soldier is far from the last man to tell her in the course of the film that she has no right doing what she’s doing.  He is the last such man whom she meekly obeys.

    Fahrije belongs to a group of local women, their lives in limbo, who meet regularly for moral support and to discuss opportunities, few and far between, to improve their financial situation.  Word of an initiative offering free driving lessons reaches the group; several other women encourage Fahrije to take advantage of it; after some hesitation, she agrees.  A quick learner, she soon has her own licence and, through the support group, a secondhand car.  As the village’s seemingly lone woman driver, she also instantly acquires a notorious reputation.  The honey doesn’t generate income enough to keep her family going so Fahrije tries her hand with another foodstuff – ajvar, a red pepper-based condiment popular in Kosovo and cheap to produce.  Accompanied by her older friend Najzmike (Kumrije Hoxha) and a supply of unlabelled jars of ajvar, Fahrije drives to a supermarket in Pristina, with the aim of persuading the manager (Adem Karaga) to stock the product.  The manager isn’t among the men that try to warn her off:  he tastes and commends the relish, and says all it needs to sell well is a branding label.  This success means that Fahrije succeeds, too, in vindicating the village animus against her.  A female driver is bad enough, a female entrepreneur beyond the pale.

    The opposition faced by Fahrije expresses a-woman’s-place prejudices intensified in a rural community that has become, in light of the massacre of its younger men, a peculiar kind of gerontocracy.  The bar owner and the gaggle of middle-aged-to-elderly men who sit in the street outside the bar are the epicentre of violent hostility towards Fahrije.  Her relationship with her teenage daughter, Zana (Kaona Sylejmani), is increasingly fractious; the tensions between them culminate in Zana calling her mother ‘a whore – like everyone else says’.  The behaviour of the pepper wholesaler, Bahri (Astrit Kabashi), who asks Fahrije out for a coffee (she says no) and, the next time she comes to his premises, tries and fails to force himself on her, startlingly illustrates the perception that, because she’s acting independently, Fahrije is declaring herself to be unattached and is therefore sexually available.  A major strength of Hive, though, is that Blerta Basholli reveals the antagonism towards Fahrije to be, at least in some cases, more than just benighted misogyny.  To use terms familiar in contexts more banal than the one Basholli depicts, Fahrije is a case of someone failing to ‘move on’ or to ‘find closure’ in relation to her husband’s presumed death.  A main reason she can’t move on is that any sign of doing so is interpreted by others as a betrayal of Agim, who could still be alive.

    This is dramatised chiefly within Fahrije’s household.  Zana’s anger with her mother is fuelled in large part by grief at the absence of a father the girl is old enough to remember well.  (Fahrije’s son, Edon (Mal Noah Safqui), is younger and less hard for her to handle.)  Agim’s father, Haxhi (Çun Lajçi), to some extent represents the resentful chauvinism of the village’s older men but he’s also in mourning for a loved son.  Fahrije receives occasional visits from representatives of a (presumably national) agency for tracing the disappeared.  To help find Agim, Ardian (Shkelqim Islami) and Edi (Blin Sylejmani) ask for a DNA sample, which Haxhi refuses to, perhaps daren’t provide.  Basholli’s focus on the central family means the audience can’t feel that similar allegiances underpin the outward attitudes of the other villagers but we can assume that’s the case:  it’s essential to the story that Fahrije’s family’s situation isn’t unique.  At the same time, by majoring on the behaviour (rather than probing the motivation) of the old men who throw stones at Fahrije’s car and, later, vandalise her stock, Basholli gives due weight to the noxious face of patriarchy in the community – a tradition that obviously predates the recent war and its consequences.

    Hostility towards Fahrije isn’t exclusive to the local men; it’s felt by women too, even including a few in the support group.  Concentrating on the protagonist and those closest to her doesn’t work so well in this aspect.  Female envy and suspicion are allayed a bit too suddenly and comprehensively – to allow a sisterhood cottage industry to flourish, as the women join forces producing batches of ajvar.  Within Fahrije’s family, though, the distaff side’s complicated feelings are very well conveyed.  Zana, once she’s on board, admits it was ‘everyone else’ branding her mother a whore that caused Zana pain and to call Fahrije the same.  As for the heroine, despite the new lease of life the business venture gives her, she’s still rooted in what she has lost but can’t let go of.  I wasn’t sure, when Haxhi wouldn’t give a DNA sample, why Fahrije didn’t go behind his back and get her children to supply one instead:  she may simply feel it would be wrong to ask this of them; she may, at some level, be relieved by her father-in-law’s intransigence, which reduces the chances of Agim being confirmed dead.  Haxhi provides the DNA eventually but this seems to be his decision rather than the result of Fahrije’s pressure.

    In the climax to Hive, the women gather to celebrate their growing commercial success, drinking and dancing together. (Zana joins in the dancing; Edon, the only male present, sits looking a bit baffled and bored.)  It’s dramatically apt and effective that Basholli follows this scene with the reappearance of Ardian and Edi, who bring news.  The film ends, or nearly ends, as it began but this time Fahrije inspects grim evidence by invitation.  She drives to a building where she’s ushered into a vast room, full of numbered piles of clothing and pairs of shoes (a setting that naturally brings to mind the epilogue to Jasmila Žbanić’s Quo Vadis, Aida? (2020)).  Fahrije is directed towards the pile on which traces of her husband’s DNA have been found.  Until this point, she has seemed fearfully controlled, expecting to be confronted with what she needs but dreads to find.  Now she breaks down, sobbing that the clothing isn’t Agim’s.  Ardian and Edi quietly and sympathetically insist that it is but Fahrije won’t have it.  Is she in denial of unarguable evidence of her husband’s death or is she somehow right and his fate still unresolved?   This ambiguity seems only right:  Basholli’s closing legends note that, twenty years on from the conflict, there are 1,600 Kosovans still ‘missing’, including sixty-four from Krushë e Madhe.

    In dreams, Fahrije sees herself and Agim (Armend Smajli) deep underwater, struggling and failing to reach each other.  Although effective enough, these occasional sequences have the look of dreams of someone who watches more arthouse cinema than Fahrije does.  Basholli makes fine use, however, of a less eye-catching water supply – the family’s basic shower (which Fahrije at one point is shown struggling to repair).  She washes her father-in-law under the shower and we sense his mute discontent at being so dependent on her.  Edon tells his mother not to look when he’s about to emerge from behind the shower curtain:  moments later, he’s combing his hair in front of the mirror and Fahrije’s face makes painfully clear that her pre-adolescent son is starting to remind her of his father, who isn’t there to see his children growing up.   That may also explain her tears in the shower room after a conversation with Zana about her first period, although Fahrije could be reflecting too on what the future holds for a young woman in this society.  As well as the water motif, there are resonant repeated images of broken glass – the window of Fahrije’s car, the smashed jars of ajvar, the photograph frame containing a picture of Agim that Zana flings to the ground in the big argument with her mother.  The cinematographer Alex Bloom’s palette is nearly always subdued but it’s remarkable how much tonal variety is achieved within his grey-greens and browns, and there are welcome moments of increasing light.  Julien Painot’s simple, unassertive music always helps the narrative.

    It’s conventional, at least in Anglophone cinema, for a film to announce at the start that it’s based on a true story – as if daring the viewer to find what follows less than credible.  It’s refreshing (especially for someone who’s just seen The Duke!) that Blerta Basholli confirms only at the end of Hive that she has dramatised, as well as an historically real situation, the experiences of a real person. Alongside images of her, we learn that Fahrije Hoti is still running a successful business producing and now exporting ajvar and other comestibles.  According to what I’ve read about Hoti subsequently, her husband was indeed one of the sixty-four men from Krushë e Madhe whose bodies have never been found.

    In the very last scene of the film, Fahrije is back at the hive that Agim started (and whose bees, she recalls, never stung him).  This may not be a winter film in terms of the seasons shown on the screen but the emotional weather is often hivernal (funny coincidence, the first four letters of that adjective).  For anyone familiar with Sylvia Plath’s great poem ‘Wintering’, the themes of bee-keeping and male absence, and Fahrije’s determination to create a future, can’t fail to evoke Plath lines (‘The bees are all women … They have got rid of the men, / The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. / Winter is for women … / Will the hive survive? … / The bees are flying.  They taste the spring’).  Ylla Gashi, like Blerta Basholli an Albanian Kosovan, is wonderful in the lead role.  With her swarthy colouring and features that are handsome rather than pretty, Gashi is dourly beautiful and a compelling presence.  At first, her looks recall more glamorous, exquisite faces – Sandra Bullock, even Juliette Binoche.  As Hive goes on, you keep thinking there’s someone else she reminds you of and, by the end, you realise who.  Ylla Gashi has made such a strong impression that she reminds you of herself.

    7 March 2022

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