Mark Reviews Movies: ALI & AVA

Ali & Ava, Greenwich Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

Writer/director Clio Barnard tries to tackle a bit more than the simple and generally sweet story of Ali & Ava allows. At its core, this is a love story about two people from different backgrounds, with different tastes, and with different experiences finding a connection in their shared loneliness and kindness. Because of those differences, some conflict is inevitable, perhaps, but the source and larger implications of the conflict here raise issues that Barnard's screenplay isn't willing to really explore and dissect.

When this focuses on the tale of a budding romance, though, the movie succeeds, and a lot of that success comes from the story's simplicity and ordinariness. The soon-to-be lovers are Ali (Adeel Akhtar), the kindhearted landlord of some cozy flats, and Ava (Claire Rushbrook), a teaching assistant at the school that the daughter of one of Ali's friends/tenants attends.

Ali is of Pakistani descent, and Ava is the daughter of an Irish immigrant to the West Yorkshire area of England. She's a widow, and he's unofficially separated (They still live together, in order to keep up appearances with his family and the wider community) from his wife Runa (Ellora Torchia), who has started dating another man.

They connect mostly by chance, because Ali picks up the girl from school one day when it's raining and offers Ava a ride to her home. The conversation is amiable, and when some local kids start throwing rocks at Ali's car, he puts on an impromptu dance party for them. Barnard imbues these characters, such little scenes within the community, and the relationship as a whole with a degree of easygoing harmony that could be seen as optimistically naïve, but Akhtar and Rushbrook embody that natural sense of hope and benevolence that we buy it within the bigger picture.

That's partly why it's odd when a major source of conflict becomes Ava's youngest son Callum (Shaun Thomas), who alternately lives with his mother and his girlfriend, the mother of the couple's baby. His father, whom Ava left because of abuse, was a member of racist political organization, and since the son idolizes his old man, Callum is horrified when he finds Ali in his home, dancing and singing with Ava (Her eldest daughter, played by Mona Goodwin, has a similar reaction, but that's dropped as quickly as it's established).

The problem isn't that this is raised as a conflict in Ali & Ava. It's that Barnard seems to introduce it only as a reason for a snag in the romance, leaving out any kind of conversation about prejudice (Ali is tolerant of the son's intolerance, because he understands Callum is grieving, and a key discussion about the young man's father occurs off-screen). The subplot is also enough of a distraction from the main characters, as well as their own fears and hopes about the relationship, that the movie loses precious time that it could have been spending with them.

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