[FILM]
ALI & AVA
It’s the way he tells them.
★★★★
OUT 4 MARCH CERT TBC / 95 MINS
DIRECTOR Clio Barnard
CAST Claire Rushbrook, Adeel Akhtar, Ellora Torchia
PLOT Ava (Rushbrook) is a loving woman living on a Bradford estate who has survived an abusive marriage. When she meets Ali (Akhtar), a local landlord with his own marital problems, the pair fall in love, but are challenged by their different backgrounds.
OPTIMISM IS A RARE thing to find in a Clio Barnard film. Her bruising debut The Arbor blended fiction and non-fiction to retell the story of a young woman’s suffering on a Bradford estate. The Selfish Giant, which follows two school friends who make a living selling scrap metal, ends in tragedy. The visual imprints of both films can be found on Ali & Ava —a ragand-bone cart trots across one frame, the guts of a gargantuan factory billowing out into the sky fill another — but it is also underscored with a tentative and almost unnerving sense of joy.As if the rug could be pulled out from under Ali, Ava and their burgeoning love at any moment.