Ali & Ava mixes quintessential English social realism with Romeo and Juliet-esque romance ★★★★☆

A ‘realistic fable’, as screenwriter and director Clio Barnard called her beautiful breakthrough film The Selfish Giant (2013) at the time in de Volkskrant† Two street rascals in Bradford, a former industrial town plagued by poverty and unemployment, are expelled from school and start a lucrative career as a scrap dealer. Barnard depicted their existence with almost magical glimmers of optimism, without downplaying its hopelessness.

Also the re-located in Bradford Ali & Ava can be viewed as such a fable. Just because Barnard succeeds in mixing quintessentially English social realism with Romeo and Juliet-like romance.

The Anglo-Asian Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a landlord of the good kind (another fabulous element in a social-realistic context), who takes the daughter of one of his tenants to school and thus widow Ava (Claire Rushbrook) against the body runs. Ali is an adult child who struggles with his impulsive behavior and the expectations of his genteel family: nobody knows that his marriage has been broken and he and his wife now live in separate rooms within the same house.

About ten years her senior, Ava struggles with memories of her children’s abusive father. Her eldest son Callum (nice role of Shaun Thomas, one of the boys from The Selfish Giant) is now a young father himself and acts like a troublemaker when Ali visits Ava. The spark has already jumped, partly because of a shared love for music.

From domestic violence to culture and class differences, it’s a lot that Barnard pours out on the viewer, but it works. And again she films the drab ugliness of Bradford at its best. The city as a state of mind: in the morning in the sun or at night from a car, while lights on the street draw distorted patterns on the rain-soaked windshield.

She views her characters with a similarly cheerful look. In other films there might also be a certain incalculable threat to Ali: take a scene in which he dances on the roof of a car with headphones on, just a little too fanatically. But here such a potentially dangerous image looks resilient.

So this marriage between social realism and romantic drama is also a musical: rarely has such an eclectic soundtrack – from the energetic punk rock of the Buzzcocks to the techno of Daniel Avery – provided such a striking picture of the heady inner world of two lost souls. .