Tender Is The North

Few people understand the sensitivity of life on the fringes quite like Clio Barnard. The writer and director of Ali & Ava has always been tuned in to the stories of those contemporary Britain often sidelines, giving them tenderness and light in a world that chooses darkness above all else. Sam Moore guides us through what makes her such a singular voice.

Britain is more than London. It’s more than cities and skyscrapers, trendy restaurants and metropolitan extravagance. It’s an island where if you travel 20 minutes you’ll find a completely different regional accent and way of life. But in contemporary British cinema the world is incredibly London-centric, caught up in tales of gang life or the nostalgia of the costume drama. Clio Barnard’s films, mostly set in her native Bradford (and all in the wider Yorkshire area), represent everything else – working-class life in post-industrial British cities, places left behind by the dual force of globalisation and outsourcing of the shellacking that the North has suffered under the brutalism of 12 years of austerity. The poetry of her social realist work make her a less didactic heir to Ken Loach – as films such as 2013’s The Selfish Giant, 2017’s Dark River and now Ali & Ava show, Barnard is spotlighting those on the edge.

A story of love and class and race, Ali & Ava is a natural push forward for Barnard as the film follows its two titular characters as they navigate falling in love at middle age. They try to overcome decades of failed relationships, spoken and unspoken prejudices and their existences in entirely different economic worlds. It’s the filmmaker’s simplest story in many ways (it has an actual plot, for a start) and it’s also Barnard’s first film where characters from drastically different class backgrounds intertwine so intimately. The worlds of Dark River or The Selfish Giant are very insular, in that they offer a singular perspective of their environment, while Ali & Ava expands, contrasting and comparing how different worlds see each other.

Ali is a Pakistani property developer (Loach would never have made the landlord a nice guy) and Ava a teaching assistant, and a relationship blooms from a shared dissatisfaction with their role in the universe. It can be hard to see beyond a fairly convention love story but Barnard being Barnard, she incorporates her unique brand of deeply empathetic social realism into a tale about love having a strength that nothing can conquer, how it is the branch that supports all of the leaves and is the unifier in a world of resentment, expectation and societal enforced division. 

 Barnard made her debut in 2009 with The Arbor, a wildly experimental blur of fiction and documentary about the life of the late Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar who tragically died aged 29 of a brain haemorrhage. In her retelling of the beleaguered playwright’s short life, the filmmaker establishes the setting that would occupy all of her movies except for Dark River – a Northern council estate. Her camera sees the setting as bleak yet often beautiful, the rigour of its grim concrete structures often overcome by the small snippets of joy found within the ordinaries of life.

Barnard’s Bradford is a place even immune to gentrification – it, like many slightly beleaguered northern cities, still has scrappies doing the rounds and a horse and cart in the street is not an uncommon sight. Her films often heroise the beauty of the working classes of making it through the day in a world built for the few – The Selfish Giant, a loose adaptation of an Oscar Wilde fairytale, is a dark parable for 21st century Britain under the regimes of David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson and an often unbearably bleak look at families thrown overboard and left to drown by capitalism. What is most surprising about Ali & Ava is its close focus on the happy moments, the flashes of time echoing around our heads in the darkness. 

Dark River, a film about the permanent scars of abuse set in the decaying farm industry can’t escape the horror, the moments of catharsis in its final scene insurmountable to the tragedy that befalls the previous 90 minutes. The Selfish Giant, in all its Kes-like glory, can’t take its furious gaze away from the savagery of capitalism that claims the life of a child in pursuit of a pound. The Arbor bluntly acknowledges the devastation addiction and mental health issues wreak on working class communities that have been stripped of resources for therapy and outreach. 

While grounded in the same reality and set in the same location, Ali & Ava is also more grounded in the grubbiness of life. It’s less lyrical than The Selfish Giant, which has the might of Shakespearean tragedy running through it. Ali & Ava is more kitchen sink, while continuing to investigate the themes occupying Barnard’s work – mainly, there’s nowt lonelier than living in England when you’re not wanted.

Her characters can never have what they desire, even the bones of society like comfortable housing or a safe, stimulating childhood. Barnard’s Bradford, despite being the second biggest city in Yorkshire after Leeds, is an isolating, horrendously grey place. It’s industrial but no longer manufactures anything, a titan of Britain’s technological revolution but now a purgatory for the lost, damned and impoverished. Nothing grows in the greyness of her Bradford, it just exists, which is an achievement of defiance in the face of the capitalist monster hammering down as the money corrupts and takes lives, as seen in both Dark River and The Selfish Giant.

Where Barnard has previously been occupied with the drama of the heartbroken, of the damage in lives, with Ali & Ava she’s moving on to something a little more straightforward, which, given it was made during a pandemic that has taken over five million lives and while professional footballers are pleading with the government to feed impoverished children, is quite something. There’s something quite wonderful in the film’s gentle simplicity and Barnard’s restraint, from writing something closer to Dark River in which Ruth Wilson’s character can’t escape from under a cloud of trauma.

Ali and Ava are as normal as whatever normal is, just making it through the day, wondering about what they could be or could have been if others could see them for who they really are, fighting away the creeping ghosts of the past to find a future happiness, questioning their place in a world seemingly built for others. It’s the same but a different Barnard, in the sense that the story is very her but it’s also hard to imagine her making it five years ago, without being in the same miserablist range as Dark River. The heart of The Selfish Giant is there and so is the nuanced characterisation of Dark River, but that leftist righteous fury has evolved into something more optimistic. It’s a place where there is beauty in survival, in living and waking up in the morning to the warm, unmistakable touch of love – because when the nights are dark, it’s all we have.

Ali & Ava is released in UK cinemas on March 4. Find your nearest screening here.

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