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