Clio Barnard’s romance is warm without pretending that affection makes family life simple. Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook make it worth an evening, even when the writing tidies away complications too readily.
Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava is a warmly persuasive romance whose leads are more convincing than some of its plotting. It takes the possibility of companionship seriously, including the awkward business of bringing someone new into a life that already contains other people and their expectations. We recommend it for Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook, who make attraction feel like something happening between two particular adults. The writing is less sure when it tries to make the people around them matter equally.
The pleasure in Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook’s performances is how little they need to insist on the attraction. They give loneliness its weight without making it the only thing either person can express, and the humour prevents the tentative romance from becoming solemn. We were moved by their shared enjoyment of music, because it makes getting to know someone look pleasurable before it becomes complicated. Their ease together is persuasive enough that we want more time with them than the surrounding plot always allows.
Music gives these two a practical way to spend time together without having to account for their feelings at every turn. Harry Escott’s music contributes to the film’s gentleness, but the sharing of songs does the clearest dramatic work: listening becomes something each can do for the other. The soundtrack also permits pleasure for its own sake, a welcome quality in a drama with family difficulties to accommodate. These people have something to enjoy together before they have much to explain.
Ole Birkeland’s intimate cinematography lets us watch the actors closely without losing the sense of life around them. Stéphane Collonge’s production design helps the surroundings feel like places where people already live, with room for lives beyond the central couple. That ordinary bustle matters to the warmth of the film. Clio Barnard makes a new relationship feel like one event among many, with demands on both leads that do not stop when they meet.
Maya Maffioli’s editing is particularly useful when the film moves between humour and more difficult feelings. Those changes do not announce that we should stop laughing and pay attention; they grow out of people whose troubles have not removed their capacity for fun. The slightly offbeat cutting also keeps the gentler passages from becoming too comfortable. For a film running 95 minutes, it finds room to linger over companionship without making every exchange serve an obvious purpose.
The weakness is in how unevenly that attention is distributed. Ali’s family and community feel less developed than Ava’s, and that imbalance leaves us with a poorer understanding of the people around him. Clio Barnard’s screenplay also makes some complications too easy to put in order, which is a problem when the performances have persuaded us to expect less convenient behaviour. The romance survives this, but some supporting characters seem to have been brought in chiefly to delay it.
The warmth is particularly welcome in a social-realist romance about working-class lives, where happiness can too easily seem like an oversight. Here the humour belongs to people who have troubles and still find each other funny, without asking us to congratulate them for carrying on. The actors are given time to make that pleasure believable. Watch it for the couple, and allow a little patience for the relatives.
