Ali & Ava

Writer/director Clio Barnard

director on the set

ALI & AVA               B+                                                                                                          Great Britain  (95 mi)  2021  ‘Scope  d: Clio Barnard

What would happen if you took melodrama as a genre and applied it to a social-realist version of Bradford that’s based on real people?  It’s an opportunity to think about what it means to be part of a community.  There’s a lot of kindness, generosity and support in Bradford and I wanted to see that writ large on the big screen.                                                                            —Writer/director Clio Barnard

An exquisitely made film that comes at you from unexpected places, becoming a film for our times, an update on the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film ALI:  FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974), which was itself a reworking of the Douglas Sirk melodrama, All That Heaven Allows (1955), filmed only ten miles from where the writer/director grew up in Bradford, which has been the setting in three of her four feature films to date, like 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #4 The Arbor (2011) and Barnard’s equally great 2014 Top Ten List #6 The Selfish Giant, while all four of her films have been set in Yorkshire County.  In those films, what Barnard does extremely well is showcase marginalization in the town of Bradford, people living on the fringes of society, poetically expressing how ordinary lives can be extraordinary.  This may be her most accessible work, featuring an unconventional working class interracial romance from two character actors who rarely get the chance to perform in lead roles, British-Pakistani-Kenyan actor Adeel Akhtar, who has mostly been seen on television, and Claire Rushbrook, who got her start working with Mike Leigh in Secrets and Lies (1996,) also playing opposite Samantha Morton in Carine Adler’s vastly underseen UNDER THE SKIN (1997), her one and only feature, where it’s important to say these two actors perfectly embody the unique characters they inhabit.  This is a surprisingly offbeat film that dares to explore cultural differences through an unlikely middle-age romance, yet what really stands out is the abstract, impressionistic style of the director, taking pages from the Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold social realist playbook, yet making it unique to her own aesthetic, creating an emotionally deep portrait of life in Bradford, West Yorkshire, inspired by two people that Barnard met while she was making earlier films, Moey Hassan, a Bradford actor (who appears briefly in the film), landlord, and DJ who worked with her on THE ARBOR, while a few years later she met Rio, a teacher’s assistant at a school in Bradford who walked out of an abusive relationship during the making of THE SELFISH GIANT, with additional support from script consultant and Bradford-based writer Kamal Kaan.

Music is the beating heart of the film, like an unseen character, described by the director as a “social realist musical,” as profoundly memorable as the personalities who embrace it, as it’s something that links these two people together, beautifully integrating their distinctly different internalized worlds.  Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a likeable Pakistani landlord, a former DJ who is into punk and rap, exuberant music you can dance to, like the Buzzcocks, Sylan Esso, and Lunar C, while Ava (Claire Rushbrook) is a caring and exceedingly sensitive teacher’s assistant, a widowed Irish mother and grandmother who, much to his dismay, is more into country music and traditional folk ballads, like American outlaw country singer Sammi Smith and Irish singer Karan Casey.  Both Ireland and Pakistan are two countries that were part of the former British Empire, each carrying a legacy of violence and racism, yet part of the melting pot of post-industrial Bradford, which once drew migrant workers from around the world, playing an important part in the early history of the Labour Party, but now facing serious economic and social challenges.  Bradford is a culturally diverse city that has an uncomfortable history of racism, especially in the 70’s, which were marked by hateful demonstrations and attacks, also known for the Brontë sisters who were born on the outskirts.  Both coming from troubled situations and different worlds, yet living in the same town, Ali lives with his recently separated wife Runa (Ellora Torchia) in a working class immigrant neighborhood of rowhouses, while Ava lives in the predominately white housing estate of Holme Wood, leaving her door open to an extended family that frequently come to visit.  What brings them together is their mutual affection for an extremely shy 6-year old girl, Sofia (Ariana Bodorová), a child from Slovak tenants living in a building that Ali manages, who also has language difficulties at school, so hangs out on her own at the playground for the most part. 

In contrast to the rampant crime in the North of England depicted in THE RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009), or the working class dramas of Ken Loach, Barnard offers a compassionate perspective on Northern life, its people and their daily lives, as Ali is introduced in a dense fog standing on the roof of his car and violently headbanging to a high-energy rap track to let off steam, I Know (MAROT Remix) YouTube (4:28), while Ava is seen on a bus lost in thought to the quieter lyrics of Sammi Smith, Saunders Ferry Lane~Sammi Smith YouTube (3:16), each from their own different worlds.  As fate would have it, Ali and Ava are brought together outside the school in a driving rainstorm, with Ali offering Ava a ride home after dropping off Sofia, sharing a moment with the Buzzcocks on the car radio, Boredom YouTube (2:54), only to be pelted by rocks from belligerent neighborhood kids at Holme Wood, who simply have nothing better to do, Ali & Ava - Car Stoning YouTube (1:57), with Ali winning them over by upping the volume on his radio to music of local neighborhood rapper MC Innes, like the lure of the Pied Piper, turning into an instantaneous little dance party in his car.  The next time they meet, they jump around on a set of sofas in Ava’s living room and create their own little party, Ali & Ava - Official Clip #1 YouTube (1:51), yet they’re each listening to distinctly different musical tracks on headphones, creating a kind of kaleidoscopic mix of jubilation and confusion.  If you sense this is not your standard kitchen sink British miserablism that we’re used to, you’d be correct, as this is more celebratory and life affirming.  While there are certainly downbeat subjects woven into the storyline, with moments of profound sadness, loss, and grief, they are countered by more jubilant moments that simply recognize a joy in living, and what a comfort it is to be sharing it with someone you love. 

Premiering at Director’s Fortnight at Cannes in 2021, not much was known about this overlooked film, which seems to have fallen through the cracks and been forgotten, but this is a world class director who makes emotional powerhouse films, and this is no exception, reportedly exuding a quiet presence on the set, often deferring to the actors, realizing the importance of not knowing everything and having an openness to not knowing.  The two lead performances are remarkably nuanced, very well paired together, though they are nothing alike, other than the fact both are intrinsically linked to their respective communities, knowing their neighbors while actively helping them out, like the familiarity of Ali rolling down the car window in his neighborhood to ask who died at a passing funeral, where everyone knows everyone else, both showing signs of extreme generosity, where it’s not told in a conventional manner, as moments appear out of time, giving experimental touches that simply expand the depth and complexity of the film.  What’s particularly impressive are the Ozu-like transitional cityscape shots, like fireworks against a darkened sky, a glowing moon hovering overhead, a moody atmospheric glimpse of early morning twilight, or slowed down pauses that feel like still shots, as they accentuate moments of reflection.  Undercliffe Cemetery overlooks Bradford and is a special place for Ali and Ava to meet.  Occasionally, Sofia has a tendency to climb up the monkey bars, but gets stuck, unable to climb back down without assistance, with Ava offering her reassurance and support, but reminds her that if you’re brave enough to climb up, you must be brave enough to climb back down, which may as well be a theme for the film, which continually keeps viewers off balance even through the end credits, as there is a constant stream of surprises that greatly enhances the overall viewing experience.   

One of the most distinctive voices in British cinema, Barnard’s interest in film started at the age of 14 when she watched Mick Jagger in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970), an acid trip of a movie.  It was on TV late at night, and she viewed it on a black-and-white portable in her bedroom with the volume turned down.  What amazed her was its ability to mess with her head.  “Here’s this real rock star pretending to be one, whose sort-of girlfriend is also in the film in this crazy threesome.  There was something about the real and the fictional that was really fascinating.  It blew my tiny mind.”  What’s most astonishing is how this film subverts expectations in a modern interracial romance that counters the fearmongering of toxic politicians, where there's a tenderness within, finding beauty in the most volatile moments through a beautifully shot character study about two lonely misfits who find emotional comfort and support in each other despite their past traumas and having to deal with community expectations, as they are a catalyst for change in each other’s lives.  There are shocking turns of darkness that come out of nowhere, taking us through intensely personalized avenues of racial abuse and domestic violence, as each respective family quickly disassociates themselves from this new love interest, finding fault in their character when it’s really about race, growing perilously ugly and even dangerous when Ava’s grown son Callum (Shaun Thomas, one of the local kids in THE SELFISH GIANT) pulls a samurai sword on Ali, believing his recently deceased father would roll over in his grave, as he was a member of the National Front (UK).  Ava’s Irish Republican father, who was fiercely proud of his heritage, deeply despised the British and disowned her for marrying an Englishman, a man Callum still idolizes, despite his history of abuse, causing plenty of friction.  Similarly, Ali’s sister calls Ava a “gori chav,” which basically means white trash, coming from a more traditional-minded family that has been kept in the dark about his imminent separation that he’s too ashamed to acknowledge, still living together with Runa but in different bedrooms, having shared an unspeakable trauma that they simply never recovered from. 

It’s an unlikely culture-clash romance in a blue collar city, where the social realist style is beautifully mixed with a steady stream of lyrical musical passages that express what they’re feeling underneath, with Barnard adding her own experimental stylistic flourishes that elevate what we’re seeing onscreen, yet what’s apparent is that the joy of music is an act of resistance, exquisitely shot on ‘Scope by Ole Bratt Birkeland, who also shot her first film.  It’s all about the power of healing, where there’s no right or wrong way, but you know it when you feel it, where there’s actually a laying-on-the-hands sequence, ALI & AVA Clip | TIFF 2021 YouTube (37 seconds), as a shared love of music allows them to heal and transform one another through ordinary acts of kindness.  Familiar Bradford locations include the massive Waterstones bookstore, Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford Cathedral grounds, Cow and Calf rocks on the Ilkley Moor, and the Keighley and Worth Railway, yet it’s the inner journey that stands out, expressed through British rap, Skwolla | Lunar C YouTube (4:41), American electro-pop, Sylvan Esso - Radio (Music Video) YouTube (3:34), a raw and earthy bootleg Bob Dylan recording, Mama, You Been On My Mind (Studio Outtake - 1964) YouTube (2:55), which curiously has a crossover effect on both characters, and British pub music by Ewan MacColl expressed through a drunken mother and son duo, Ali & Ava - Official Clip #2 YouTube (53 seconds).  Yet what’s most remarkable, and may be the most impactive part of the film, is the final credits sequence, a gift that keeps giving, moving from the thumping EDM music, Daniel Avery - Drone Logic (Official Video) YouTube (5:15), to a heart-rending traditional Irish ballad from Karan Casey, Grace (From Ali & Ava) YouTube (5:29), a searing version of a social justice love song that has a similar effect as the cathartic final scene from John Huston’s The Dead (1987), finding that emotional core that leaves audiences utterly transfixed, having been thoroughly transformed by the experience. 

2014 Top Ten List #6 The Selfish Giant

THE SELFISH GIANT            A-           
Great Britain  (91 mi)  2013  d:  Clio Barnard

In Clio Barnard’s extraordinarily original first feature, 2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #4 The Arbor (2011), a unique study of the life of British playwright Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the age of 29, where the film extends the boundaries of documentary filmmaking, becoming a word play based upon actors lip-synching 90 hours of audio interviews Barnard conducted with Dunbar’s family and friends, a haunting and disorienting fusion of fact and fiction extending the artist’s tragic life into the lives of her own children, where Dunbar’s alcoholism gave way to the heroin and crack addiction of her daughter.  The director’s highly unorthodox technique accentuates the artifice of filmmaking, showing the camera and crew, exposing what the audience normally doesn’t see, using fictional methods to unravel the hidden inner truths of the artist.  Barnard grew up in the town of Otley in Yorkshire, just a half hour away from Dunbar’s home of Bradford, where she’d often go ice skating or see musical bands as a child, as her dad was a university lecturer teaching English, mostly the Romantic poets, while her mother was a jazz singer, with her parents separating at age 6, where she grew up with her dad, attending art school at Leeds, Newcastle, and then Scotland, eventually becoming a video artist with installations in art museums around the world with a healthy skepticism about the cinematic misrepresentation of realism.  Now a teacher of film studies at the University of Kent, in her second feature Barnard has embraced the same social realism she critiques so fervently in The Arbor, writing a script inspired by an Oscar Wilde children’s story about a bad-tempered giant that won’t let children play in his idyllic garden, turning it into a perpetual winter, becoming a searingly realistic piece about a young boy named Arbor, where he and his best friend have a falling out, both exploited by an unscrupulous scrap metal dealer, where they are introduced into the harshly brutal working conditions of adults, ostracized and excluded children pushed into the outer fringes of society where something has gone fundamentally wrong, victims of an ever widening gap of economic inequality, forced to endure the horrible dangers of child labor all over again due to an insatiable capitalistic greed that so willingly puts children at risk.

The story is loosely based upon a living reality, through an actual young boy named Matty that Barnard met while shooting The Arbor, as he kept getting into the shot while riding his horse, a scruffy kid wearing dirty clothes that exhibited a kind of “fuck you” attitude against others.  At times he would show up with his friend Michael, both outsiders who survived by any means necessary, where they spent their days scavenging for scrap metal in Bradford, which is one of the thriving businesses in the city, calling into question whether they were being exploited by the scrap merchant or getting an opportunity.   Barnard recalls meeting his mother who told her “What the hell else is he going to do around here?  At least he’s earning some money.”  His continual presence on the movie set eventually turned into the character of Arbor, named after the street where Dunbar lived, showing how life has a common stream–of-conscious thread that connects us all together.  Using two non-professional child actors who are onscreen in nearly every shot, the film is set in an oppressive Dickensian world of poverty, exploring the close friendship that develops between two boys who both come from dysfunctional families, with no working parents and no adult role models, whose families are barely getting by, who are teased and bullied by others who are less marginalized, but these two kids share a common bond of both being outsiders where they at least have each other.  Arbor (Conner Chapman) is the more impulsive of the two, smaller, louder, openly defiant of authority, and emotionally unpredictable, requiring medicine for his hyperactivity, while Swifty (Shaun Thomas) is more an easy going big brother, a kindhearted kid who seems to follow the lead of Arbor, remaining his most loyal friend and protector, even during troubled times.  Their relationship is reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which was similarly set during the economically challenged times of the Great Depression, but here failed industrialism is a remnant of a once thriving past in Bradford, where the economically abandoned town is drained of any possibilities of hope.      

Arbor has violent temper issues, is prone to fighting, and is quickly expelled from school, Swifty, his sidekick, along with him, where Swifty’s parents insist he not be a layabout at home, so they send him to school, despite his expulsion, where he can only spend his days sitting in perpetual detention.  This perfectly expresses how society deals with troubled kids, as they make no attempt to deal with or treat their problems when it’s so much easier to simply rid themselves of the problem altogether, leaving kids on the margins to fend for themselves where they have no resources.  Abandoned by their schools and by their families, few good options await them, and society eventually pays a price.  The one place where they can receive money is the morally dubious scrap iron dealer, Kitten (Sean Gilder), who runs a black market business on the side and becomes the only adult who actually seems to care about these boys, becoming their surrogate guardian, encouraging them to work harder, which is another way of exploiting them for cheap wages, showing them how they can burn away the traces of stolen copper wire, which puts them in ever more precarious situations of having to steal wire right under the noses of working electricians.  While Swifty has some notion of the hazards involved, Arbor is relentlessly fearless, developing a greedy and insatiable appetite for more, showing a daredevil streak that tends to get them both into trouble.  For that reason, Kitten seems to favor Swifty, allowing him to borrow a horse and cart to pick up and carry heavier items, where he doesn’t trust the more hot-headed Arbor, who flies off the handle at any given moment, driving a wedge between them.  One of the illicit activities is harness racing these animals down the auto roadways at dawn, where trucks and cars are driving right alongside the horses with drunken spectators leaning out the windows attempting to influence the outcome of the race, hoping their noise will be a distraction, turning the race into something of a thrilling spectacle.      

Unlike The Arbor, which was shown with subtitles, this film did not, so nearly half the dialogue, despite being spoken in English, is incomprehensible.  This may alter one’s appreciation for the film, as much of the written poetry is lost, but the audience has a feel for the spirit of the language, where illiterate youth and the profoundly uneducated from impoverished communities have a way of wrapping their regional dialogue in slang, gutter talk, and profanity, all of which further alienates them from the mainstream.  One of the most haunting recurring images is seeing how humanity from a dilapidated tenement housing project swells into close proximity to a cluster of five nuclear power smokestacks, as they did in THE RED RIDING TRILOGY (2009) which was also set in Yorkshire.  When Arbor and Swifty get away from it all, they wander into a pastoral green field containing an endless stream of giant electrical transmission towers, inhabitants of a veritable wasteland that extends into the horizon.  These toxic images have a life force all their own, seen as a monstrous looming presence hovering off in the distance, continually threatening to have a major impact.  While the film is about a boyhood friendship that rises out of the depths of poverty and despair, it’s also about loss, where to their mothers these boys are lost children pushed beyond their control, where that feeling of loss permeates over everything that happens by the wrenching finale, which expresses an all consuming despair not seen since the end of Brokeback Mountain (2005), or the melancholic The Sweet Hereafter (1997), where the near wordless images beautifully comment on everything that came before, altering our view of their friendship and the connecting families in the community, providing additional meaning to what feels incomprehensible, where the bleak devastation of dire poverty has rarely been expressed with such poetic eloquence.  The film is about what happens when society ignores cries for help, where the inevitable tragedies that occur will haunt and literally redefine people’s scarred lives.  A remarkably intelligent work of rare insight and daring, shot with visual acuity from cinematographer Mike Eley, Barnard examines the effects of postindustrial England with stark realism, where with utter compassion, and never pity, Barnard literally shames a nation to rediscover its own rich heritage and humanity.    

Short Stories: The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde - East of the Web  complete text of the story