He’s also married, technically at least: he and his wife (Ellora Torchia) are no longer a couple, but still live together and have not made their separation public. As with Ava’s past, this story filters out gradually, as the protagonists start to reveal more to each other than they do to anyone else.

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It all starts straightforwardly, with Ali crossing paths with Ava at the school and offering her a lift home. On the way they bond over music, or at least The Buzzcocks, since otherwise they prove to have quite different tastes.

Among the crucial traits they do share are humour, gentleness, and an ability to defuse tense situations – whether it’s a distressed child needing to be coaxed down from a piece of play equipment, or the agitation their relationship causes to some third parties even before it properly begins.

At a certain point, some buffs may think back to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 melodrama Ali: Fear Eats The Soul, or to Douglas Sirk’s 1955 All That Heaven Allows, which was Fassbinder’s model in turn. Both centre on a woman who enters into a relationship with a younger man, to the dismay of family members from the next generation.

But while Barnard may well be aware of these precursors, like her characters she has a knack for defusing tension rather than letting it mount. Rather than melodrama, what she’s after is the poetry of the commonplace, something that calls for a peculiarly delicate touch.

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The moment you start to force things, you risk slipping into condescension, as if we were meant to be touched by the fact of “ordinary” people having feelings at all.

An instance of the sort of thing I could have done without is the recurring image of Ali dancing alone in the dark on top of his car, as if the mist around him were dry ice at a club.

But the heart of the film is in the lead performances, which happily give no sense of commenting on the characters from afar. At best, we’re given room to interpret Akhtar’s gruffness for ourselves rather than having him served up pre-judged – and Rushbrook, as the more emotionally open of the pair, is as credible a woman in love as you could hope to see.