Ali & Ava: Low-Key Love Story Eyeballs Racism, Embraces Happy Romantic Accidents

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

Low-key and lovely if a bit short on dramatic umph, director Clio Barnard’s Ali & Ava is effectively a straight-up love story eyeballing bigger themes, perhaps to pad its slender story. Admirable for sure, but the result is a bit like fancy icing on a cupcake: nice, but still a cupcake.

Ava is a sweet midlife single schoolteacher navigating life after part of her brood has grown and as grandchildren insert themselves into her reality. Ali is a sweet midlife landlord whose marriage is crumbling, which is about the only thing able to dampen his perpetual enthusiasm for life, which frequently manifests in dancing on cars.

Both Ali and Ava love music — country for her, electronica for him — though they bond over a Buzzcocks song during a happenstance drive in the rain. Ali and Ava live in the kind of drab, quintessentially English town where everything seems perpetually soggy and grey.

Their lives, too, have a blandness that’s almost palpable until they discover a didn’t-see-that-coming spark between themselves. And did we mention that Ava is white and Ali is brown? Yeah, so there’s that.

Of course, love is never easy, especially later in life when there’s baggage and myriad orbiting concerns. Ava’s feckless grown son Callum is a racist who at one point confronts the couple with a sabre, though Callum does this half-heartedly, like he does most things save cradling his infant daughter. Ali, meanwhile, is struggling to determine if his marriage is salvageable. It’s not, a fact made clear by his wife’s open dating of other men, but Ali is not to the type to throw in the towel.

At points, it feels as though viewers know where this story is headed long before its principals do even as leads Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook offer committed performances that feel very real, not least because both look like the kind of folks you might actually see tending to children in a schoolyard or stopped at a traffic light.

The film’s takeaway —actually two takeaways: the heart wants what the heart wants and pay attention because love might sucker-punch you when you’re not looking — is commendable and sweet. And it’s divine seeing people north of 40 represented on screen. But the journey to the finish line is underwhelming.

Check out Bonnie Laufer’s video interview with Ali & Ava star Adeel Ahtar.

Ali & Ava. Directed by Clio Barnard. Starring Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook. Opens July 29 in Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton and Sudbury and August 12 in Hamilton and Waterloo.