‘Ari’ Review: An Intensely Performed if Loose-Limbed Portrait of an Emotionally Unstable French Man Trying to Fix His Life
With only a trio of films under her belt, writer-director Léonor Serraille has carved her own special niche within the overcrowded world of French arthouse cinema. Her 2017 breakthrough, Montparnasse Bienvenüe, won Cannes’ prestigious Camera d’Or while confirming the rising status of its lead actress, Laetitia Dosch. Her second effort, the moving and underrated immigrant drama Mother and Son, premiered in Cannes’ main competition, but never quite gained traction abroad.
And while Seraille’s third feature, the partially improvised, shot-on-the-fly character study, Ari, feels in many ways like a more minor effort compared to the others, it continues to showcase the director’s ability to coax strong performances out of both amateur and confirmed actors — including the film’s arresting lead, Andaric Manet.
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A sort of male companion piece to Montparnasse Bienvenüe, which chronicled the roller coaster life of a young woman scraping by in the City of Lights, Ari follows a similar wavering trajectory as it tracks an unstable protagonist through thick and thin, up and down (mostly the latter), apartment to apartment and argument to argument.
A 27-year-old trying to make it as a first-grade teacher in the northern city of Lille, but clearly too sensitive and unhinged to do that job properly, Ari (Manet) spends most of the movie looking for a place to spend the night while trying to put the broken pieces of his life back together. With cameraman Sébastien Buchmann (Being Maria) remaining as close as possible to Manet’s skeletal face — to the point, sometimes, that the film’s handheld style can grow tiresome — Séraille channels her antihero’s every mood, from elation to despair, from curiosity to rejection, from hope to paralyzing anxiety.
Jumping from present to past, and sometimes from reality to reverie, Ari identifies so much with its lead character that we’re practically embedded in his troubled mind. When the film opens, he’s trying to teach a bunch of 6-year-olds about the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, the camera hovering next to him as he carelessly, and somewhat hilariously, explains to the class how Desnos was an opium addict. In the middle of his lesson, he has what looks like a nervous breakdown and passes out. “Is he dead?” some of the kids ask.
After a short stint in the hospital, we follow Ari as he crashes with different friends around Lille, in a narrative that feels more like a picaresque than a fully constructed plot. Most of the people he meets up with are 20-somethings like him, though their lives seem, at least on the surface, to be more stable. Yet Ari has an almost innocent way of plying them with questions until they reveal themselves to be just as screwed-up as he is — most especially in a standout sequence involving a rich married friend (Théo Delezenne), who becomes a violent, blubbering mess by the time Ari finishes with him.
Most of the interactions have an improvised feel reminiscent of John Cassavetes (who didn’t, in fact, improvise as much as people think), with Séraille mixing more seasoned talents like Manet (co-star of the excellent hip-hop series Reign Supreme) and young actors from the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Paris. The result is a loosely assembled drama that never pulls us in as much as the director’s previous work, but offers up an honest, at times searing portrait of what it’s like to be in your 20s in this day and age, unsure of what you’re doing or what kind of future lies in store.
It’s a portrait that remains predominantly pessimistic, with nearly everyone whom Ari meets either as unhappy or unfulfilled, if not as plain anxious, as he is. Séraille attempts to reverse the trend in the film’s third act, with a narrative twist that feels a bit too movie-like to be true. And while that denouement remains dubious, on an emotional level it finally gives the young man something to latch onto in an existence that was otherwise in total freefall. The ending also explains why teaching young children has been so important to Ari, who describes kids as “the only people who almost seem normal.”
If Ari focuses mostly focuses on abnormality, or at least straying far from the norm, its lead character really wants nothing more than to achieve some kind of status quo. To many that may seem like he’s copping out, or perhaps selling out, but for Ari living an average life would probably be a major victory.
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