Ali & Ava: Mature romance with emotional punch

The filmmaker Clio Barnard first came to prominence with The Arbor, an engrossing lip-synched experimental docu-drama about Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. The director returns to Dunbar’s locale for this magical Yorkshire reworking of All That Heaven Allows. Ali (Adeel Akhtar), an enthusiastic amateur DJ and his Irish-born classroom assistant Ava (Claire Rushbrook) are not obvious candidates to interpret Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman from Douglas Sirk’s 1955 classic. Their mature, star-crossed romance, however, retains the same emotional punch.

Ava, the mother of five mostly grown-up children, and Ali, a genial landlord, bond over a fondness for six-year-old Sofia, the child of Ali’s Slovakian tenants, and music. Their tastes don’t exactly overlap. He loves the Buzzcocks; she loves Bob Dylan. But during a wonderful early sequence, the pair bellow two different songs – Sylvan Esso’s Say It on the Radio and Karen Dalton’s Something on Your Mind – to swooning and romantic effect.

Sparks fly, but these feelings are swiftly compromised by family interventions and class differences.

Ali is too ashamed to tell his British-Pakistani friends that he and his wife Runa (Ellora Torchia) are separating; they remain, unhappily, under the same roof. Ava, meanwhile, must negotiate with her disapproving son, Callum (Shaun Thomas), who seems to have inherited certain undesirable traits from his late, bullying father.  Racially loaded barbs are exchanged: “Them lot are all the same”, sniffs Ava’s eldest daughter. Ali’s sister is equally disapproving.

Akhtar, an actor who was so impressive in Four Lions and Utopia, and Claire Rushbrook, recently seen as Enola Holmes’s housekeeper, make for a quietly magnetic couple. For all the obstacles they face, this remains a strangely joyful film. An early scene in which Ali and Ava win over stone-throwing youths with banging tunes on the car stereo is emblematic of the film’s infectious resilience.