Film Shapes

The preview for this year's British Film Festival was a warm, inclusive relationship drama in the Mike Leigh vein called Ali & Ava. This is directed by Clio Barnard and stars Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook as our titled pair. It's probably the simplest plot to explain - guy slowly separating from his wife, meets a woman from another circle. They get along, but will respective influences allow them to be together? That's pretty much it, but it's the kind of film that doesn't require plottage - a functionally viewed genre pic. If we can assume the likes of Barnard, Shane Meadows, Leigh, Ken Loach, and going further back to Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, etc, all worked on and off in the Kitchen Sink Realism genre, then these lines from Warren Buckland (in Teach Yourself Film Studies) seems apt: "The genre film sets up hopes and promises and brings pleasure if these hope and promises are fulfilled. In studying genre films, we first need to...