A pair of wonderfully winning performances from Claire Rushbrook and Adeel Akhtar lie at the heart of this unexpectedly warm and typically compelling drama from British writer-director Clio Barnard. Described by its creator as a love story about two people who are “a catalyst for change in each other’s lives”, it’s a heartfelt piece that marries the poetic grit of Barnard’s 2013 film The Selfish Giant with something resembling a later-life Romeo and Juliet romance – a fable grounded in reality. Playing out over the course of a lunar month, and drawing inspiration from real-life characters whom Barnard met while filming her previous features, Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.
Bafta-nominated for his performance, Akhtar is Ali, a Bradford-based British Asian who is nominally a landlord, but who seems more like a benignly eccentric uncle. A big kid at heart, Ali has a youthful soul that seems to give him an affinity with the various children he encounters. In a lovely early scene, we see him persuading Sofia (Ariana Bodorova), the young daughter of one of his tenants, to go to school by offering to carry her on his shoulders – a goofy solution that works wonders. Later, Ali wins over a group of stone-throwing schoolchildren by turning up the stereo in his car, encouraging them to sing and dance along to the sounds of local Holme Wood hero MC Innes. It’s a bravura sequence, beautifully balanced on the knife-edge between choreography and chaos, conjuring a spontaneous sense of joy.
Ali has long harboured his own DJ dreams, storing vinyl and turntables in the downstairs den to which he has retreated since his marriage to Runa (Ellora Torchia) collapsed. Now they are “separated – we live in the same house, but separately” – a heartbreaking situation which Ali has yet to confess to his family. As for Ava (Rushbrook), she’s a classroom assistant of proud Irish descent whose children and grandchildren are all around her. While Ali (who meets Ava while picking up Sofia from school) listens to dance beats, Ava loves country and folk, a discovery that prompts a hilariously deadpan car-bound exchange between the pair.
Back at Ava’s house, Ali instigates a headphone disco that switches between the sounds of Sylvan Esso’s Radio and Karen Dalton’s Something on Your Mind, recalling a key scene from François Ozon’s Summer of 85 which itself harked back to an intimate musical moment from Claude Pinoteau’s La Boum. Miraculously, this contrapuntal sequence then segues into the unifying sound of the Specials’ (Dawning of a) New Era, with Ali and Ava’s sofa-dancing rudely interrupted by the arrival of Ava’s overprotective son Callum (The Selfish Giant’s Shaun Thomas) brandishing a sword.