Buzzcocks, in't it? Is Ali & Ava part of the real world?

There's a memorable scene in Clio Barnard's 2021 film Ali & Ava - which I watched last night - where the two central characters are in a car and one of them suddenly gets super-excited when Buzzcocks' Boredom comes on on the car radio. Hey, now! A punk rock moment in this gritty (as the film critics say) interracial romcom set in moody rain-lashed Bradford. Yeah, kind of interesting. The dialogue goes like this:

Ali: "Oh, you're fucking joking me. No! Can I bang it up? 

Ava: "Yeah, whack it on."

Ali: "Do you know it?"

Ava: "Yeah, I do."

Ali: "Who is it, then?"

Ava: "Buzzcocks, in't it?"

Ali: "Yeah, it's the Buzzcocks, yeah. Oh my god, I love this song. Oh! I used to be a DJ, me. Yeah, yeah. Bhangra during the day, electro at night."

Ava: "Oh, right."

Ali: "Yeah, yeah. [Singing along] Boredom! Are you into music?"

Ava: "Yeah, I like country music, me."

Ali: "Well, that's it then. I'll pull up, shall I?  

Ava: [Laughs]

Ali: "What the fuck? That's it, that's it for me. Country? You can't dance to that, can ya?"

Ava: "Yeah, you can. You can, yeah."

Ali: "Can you? Right, well you'll have to show me. [Long pause] Well, you must like something else."

Ava: "I like folk."

Ali: "Folk? Fucking hell. It's getting worse."

Ava: "You know, my dad used to sing all t'rebel songs in the pubs."

Ali: "Wow."

Ava: "He were a good singer. Irish Catholic immigrant."

Ali: "You know, punk, yes. Rock and roll, yes. Jazz, no. Folk, you can fuck off, that's it."

(Not especially) fast cars: Ali and Ava discuss music 

It's a pretty good scene. Ali (Adeel Akhtar), an easygoing middle-aged guy with serious marital problems, is chatting up Ava (Claire Rushbrook), a middle-aged widow. He's of South Asian descent, she's white with (as she mentions) a partly Irish background. It's love across the divide in the terraced streets and hilltop estates of Bradford, areas which - as we see - suffer from racism and classism, including from South Asian families who look down on "gori chavs". The music chat is fairly funny (Ali's a perpetual joker, partly to disguise his deeper unhappiness) and as the film progresses music is used repeatedly, as plot device and as atmosphere. Fine, man, fine. I found the film OK-ish but - if I'm honest - not much more than this, and I think Barnard's mix of Loachian social realism, art-film stylistics and TV-esque melodrama isn't, in the end, really for me. But the music choices in Ali & Ava are definitely interesting. There's stuff from the Slovak singer Robo Opatovský, from the Indian singer AR Rahman, from the US electropop band Sylvan Esso (Radio, much used in the film), and a host more. Bob Dylan's Mama, You Been On My Mind also appears repeatedly. In fact, the film is arguably over-stuffed with music and might have been better with some of it trimmed out. As it is, the film is almost a modern musical, or something vaguely approximating to this. And it has the un-reality of a musical. In one scene we see Ali defuse a potentially dangerous situation where a crowd of children are throwing stones at him and Ava simply by turning up MC Innes on the car radio. Yep, Bradford rapper comes to the rescue (oh, you're fucking joking me, as Ali might say). Back in that music chat scene in the car, neither Ali nor Ava appear to find it especially surprising that daytime radio would be playing a Buzzcocks song from Spiral Scratch, albeit the most famous one. Has this ever been played by a daytime radio DJ? Yes, Ali sounds semi-surprised (you're fucking joking me), but this is more excitement than out-and-out astonishment. To make matters even more peculiar, it's the demo we hear, not the Spiral Scratch version (at first I thought it was a rough and ready cover version, not Buzzcocks themselves). I suppose Barnard - or her music researchers - deserve plaudits for choosing something that isn't Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've), and likewise a Specials song we hear later in the film is the magnificently wired (Dawning Of A) New Era and not one of the more obvious hits. It's undeniably nice to hear snatches of these great songs in a film (any film, never mind a reasonably good one like Ali & Ava), but it's basically musical connoisseurship at the expense of realism. And call me an un-romantic soul, but in the real world I don't think Ali and Ava would immediately have identified Devoto and Shelley's whiny classic from a few seconds of a demo version coming out of the car radio speakers one random weekday afternoon. I suppose this is how I responded to the film in general - I was watching it but not really believing it. Or as Howard Devoto puts it, you see I'm-ah living in this ah-movie, ah but it doesn't move me ...