Tag: Clio Barnard

Ali & Ava

Posted on by victorfraga

The titular characters begin an unlikely relationship in Clio Barnard’s new drama about a British-Pakistani DJ and an Irish teaching assistant, navigating their disapproving families in the filmmaker’s beloved Bradford. The romance seems equally unlikely for the director of Dark River (2017) and The Selfish Giant (2013) but has its share of gritty elements, namely mental health, domestic abuse and racism, albeit more along the lines of My Beautiful Launderette (Stephen Frears, 1985) than Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine, 2011).

The pair meet when Ali (Adeel Akhtar) collects his tenant’s child from school, single-handedly rehabilitating the image of landlords everywhere. He gives Ava (Claire Rushbrook) a lift to her house on the wrong side of the tracks while bonding over punk on the radio. Never mind the Buzzcocks, it’s their conservative families they have to worry about, not least because Ali has kept his separation from his wife (Ellora Torchia) a secret.

This is a film of contrasts, not just between rap-loving Ali and folk-fan Ava, but also in the joyous days, lonely nights and conflicted characters. Both have an outer strength and exuberance that hides different types of scars, reflected in the cinematography that turns at dusk, and musical shifts from extroverted electronic dance music to the plaintive cry of Bob Dylan.

One scene becomes a makeshift silent disco as Ali listens to dance and Ava country music on their respective headphones. The sound keeps swapping from one to the other, giving both perspectives at once, emphasising their similarities as much as their differences. They eventually settle on two-tone (what else?) but like its usage in This Is England (Shane Meadows, 2006), racism is never far away.

The comparison ends there since Barnard’s film is quite gentle and easygoing, thanks to the effortless chemistry of its ska-crossed lovers. As in the BBC series Back to Life, Akhtar exudes warmth and good humour, with vulnerability beneath the surface,which makes you fall in love with him. Rushbrook is similarly layered, conveying just as much emotion with less animation. Together with Barnard’s funny, natural dialogue, their compatibility makes you root for this charming and realistic relationship.

As a snapshot of multicultural Britain, Ali & Ava falls short of a quiet revelation like Rocks (Sarah Gavron, 2019), maybe feeling slight in the wake of Dark River. It is an entirely different beast, less mud and misery, more Waterstones and pot noodle, where loveable, believable characters yield an unusually tender and hopeful slice of social realism.

Ali & Ava premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2021. In cinemas on Friday, March 4th (2022). On all major VoD platforms on Monday, May 23rd.

Dark River

Posted on by victorfraga

Following in the thematic footsteps of Hope Dickson Leach’s The Levelling (2017) and Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country (2017), Clio Barnard’s Dark River offers itself as a comparative text, ensuring a verisimilitude depiction of life in rural Britain. As Alice, actor Ruth Wilson offers a delicateness to a woman haunted by her past, to which is heightened by the director’s choice to merge Alice’s past and present together, resulting in pastness projecting itself into her adult life.

After her father’s death, Alice is obligated to travel back to her family’s Yorkshire farm after 15 years away – her movement elicited through the wide lenses and frames of Barnard and her cinematographer Adriano Goldman. As a means, she faces an uphill emotional and physical battle to restore some working order to the farm after her brother Joe (Mark Stanley) and father (Sean Bean) neglected its running. Only seen through Alice’s perspective, Sean Bean’s physicality imbues the frame with a Gothic quality; in every corner, he lingers. Locked over a tenancy dispute, the brother and sister’s financial woes overspill into their relationship.

Reflective of brother’s and sister’s peculiar familial dynamics, both Wilson and Stanley convey the difficulties of family. They offer equal levels of sobriety in the presents juxtaposed to their predominantly youthful joy in flashbacks. Delivered to the audience in the transitions of editing, instigated by movement, such recollections wield a vitality to Alice’s experiences. Specifically, in Wilson’s acting, the hardships of her character’s life are elicited in a subdued quality. With a withdrawn presence, this can thus lead to moments of lengthy tedium.

Driving the narrative, her strength to tirelessly pursue restoring the family farm “as it t’was when me ma and nanna ran it” is all the more compelling in the face of the pastness. Coming from a place of angry and deep emotional upset Joe is portrayed with a threatening aggression from Stanley. Still, the rationale behind all this is clearly alluded towards by Barnard’s writing.

A cinematic template of Andrea Arnold Wuthering Heights (2011), there is only so much that Dark River can do to depict the Yorkshire Moors. In the recent release of God’s Own Country, having a handful of moderately contemporary equals is to the determent of Dark River. Holding a lack of finesse or fresh takes, the social realism unfolds in a strained manner. Granted, in the final act, some cinematic flair is uncovered through the submergence of Alice and Joe – in the edit – into the land, one cannot help but feel a little underwhelmed at the overly dramatic ending. The titular dark river submerges and suffocates its conclusion.

Upheld by the riveting performance familial, Dark River offers characters who feel fully fleshed out in amongst a tedious storyline. Continuing a recent British cinematic trend of focusing away from suburbia city life towards rural communities, Barnard’s third feature film can be merited on its understandings of human emotions, less can be said about submerging the audience’s attention in its titular river of the abyss, however.

Dark River is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, February 23rd, and on VoD on Monday, June 18th.