95 min | NR | July 29, 2022 | Greenwich Entertainment
A British-Pakistani landlord and an Irish-heritage teaching assistant meet over a kid they both look after in Bradford. They are too old, too tired, and from the wrong sides of a divided city to fall for each other. They do it anyway.
Ali is a British-Pakistani landlord in Bradford who fills his car with loud music and a manic energy that hides a marriage falling apart. Ava is an older Irish-heritage teaching assistant raising children and grandchildren in a house still haunted by an abusive late husband. They meet through a child they both look after, and they connect across the lines their city draws between them. Clio Barnard makes a film about two people who have spent years performing happiness for everyone else. The romance is the engine. The real subject is the cost of carrying other people’s expectations.
Adeel Akhtar plays Ali as a man who jokes constantly because silence terrifies him. He dances on rooftops and blasts music to outrun a grief he will not name. Akhtar lets the performance crack open in small moments when the energy drains and the face goes still. Claire Rushbrook plays Ava with a tired warmth and a spine of practical steel. She has survived a violent marriage and protects her family with a vigilance that never relaxes. The two actors build intimacy through shared headphones and traded songs rather than declarations.
Barnard writes and directs with the social-realist discipline she brought to her earlier Bradford work. She shoots the city as a place of overpasses and council estates and crowded kitchens, and she finds beauty in the ordinary light of it. Music does the structural work here. Ali loves punk and electronica while Ava loves folk and country, and the film uses their clashing playlists to map the distance between them and then close it. Barnard cuts between their two houses to show how each carries the other home in their head.
The film resists the melodrama its premise invites. The obstacles are real and specific, rooted in family loyalty and old wounds and the quiet pressure of a divided community. Barnard trusts her actors to carry feeling through gesture and song rather than speeches. The result is tender without turning soft and hopeful without turning false. It is a small film about the courage it takes to want something at the wrong age and the wrong time.