Ken Loach's collaborations with screenwriter Paul Laverty have ranged from the arresting, hard-edged social drama of My Name Is Joe and Sweet Sixteen, both set in Glasgow, to their more contrived and less convincing dramatic excursions abroad in Carla's Song and Bread and Roses.
Taking its title from a Robert Burns poem, Ae Fond Kiss ... returns them to a Glasgow setting for a modern-day spin on Romeo and Juliet, as religious and cultural conflicts threaten to separate the two young lovers at the drama's centre.
Eva Birthistle plays Roisin Hanlon, a young Irish teacher at a Glasgow school. There she meets and falls in love with a young Muslim, Casim Khan (Atta Yaqub), the brother of one of her students. In outlook and personality, the entrepreneurial Casim - he has an accountancy degree but is more interested in opening his own nightclub - is, with apologies to Mary Harney, closer to Scotland than Pakistan, and he and Roisin engage in a passionate relationship.
Casim's rigidly conservative and image-conscious Punjabi-born family has other ideas. They've set him up in an arranged marriage with a cousin, and Casim's father eagerly sets about building an extension to the family home for the young man and his bride-to-be. Not all the obstacles to the relationship blossoming between Casim and Roisin stem from his community, and for balance there is a scene wherein Roisin is subjected to a vociferous haranguing by a Catholic priest (played in a rich, thundering cameo by Gerard Kelly).
Altogether less effective is an arch and heavy-handedly didactic scene where Roisin shows images of racial prejudice in 1960s America to her students while Nina Simone sings Strange Fruit on the soundtrack. And, although model-turned-actor Yaqub acquits himself well as Casim, his first film role, some of the other inexperienced actors in the cast are less confident.
However, Birthistle, the Irish actress who also featured impressively in the recent Timbuktu, precisely catches the turmoil of the emotionally conflicted Roisin, and her gritty performance is the anchor of a film that largely succeeds in injecting a familiar story with accumulating narrative power.
