‘Ari’ Review: An Intimate, Energizing Character Study of a Teacher With a Lot to Learn
For all the screenwriting manuals and maxims that insist on character goals and motivations and missions and all those things we’re supposed to have in real life too, there can be something riveting about a character with no plan at all. We never know quite where Ari, the eponymous protagonist of writer-director Léonor Serraille’s excellent third feature, is headed from one scene to the next, not least because he doesn’t either. Quarter-life drift was also the defining condition of Serraille’s 2017 debut “Jeune Femme,” a Cannes Camera d’Or winner that prompted critical comparisons — some favorable, some less so — to Agnès Varda and Lena Dunham alike. But where that film was zingy and vigorous in its youthful malaise, “Ari” turns down the brightness a bit to portray a young, unmoored trainee teacher who gives the film a more melancholic center than its predecessor.
Yet the film is no less energizing for that contrast. As Ari recovers from a career-pausing personal breakdown, he comes to realize that nobody has their life entirely assembled, and “Ari” emerges as an optimistic but unsentimental paean to working with what parts you have. Premiering in competition at Berlin, this unusual, deftly structured character study is light on plot in the conventional sense — but holds attention with staggered revelations that feel less like conveniently withheld narrative gambits than a person gradually taking stock of their past and present. Following Serraille’s lovely, underseen sophomore effort “Mother and Son” (a swerve towards classicism that her latest meets halfway), it confirms the Frenchwoman’s humane, idiosyncratic gaze and limited interest in standard story shapes.
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It opens on a scene of intensely felt mother-son affection — all tight, suitably adoring close-ups of faces, eyes and sheaves of hair — as a woman tells her beaming young son how he came to be named Ari: after the son of French painter Odilon Redon, who described the arrival as an unexpected midlife turning point. Fast-forward two decades or so, and Ari (Andranic Manet) is a nervous, lank-haired 27-year-old attempting to teach poetry to a rowdy, distracted class of primary school children. Our nerves tighten with his as he loses control of the room in the presence of an unimpressed performance evaluator, ultimately collapsing to the floor. When a doctor advises him to take some time off work, Ari concludes that a change of job is in order.
His mother, it turns out, is no longer alive to coddle him, while his father Gérard (a superb Pascal Reneric) offers tough love at best. “Your generation is really sick,” he mutters, as he chastises Ari for three wasted years of teacher training and a failed romantic relationship. The latter seems a cruel dig, though the further we delve into Ari’s past, the clearer it becomes that his breakup from Irene (Clémence Coullon) was a drastically life-determining event — its imprint visible in his mental health fluctuations, romantic explorations and career choices. Manet’s soft-edged but compellingly tense performance limns a man who’s never quite living in the moment, because he’s dwelling on (or in) so many past and hypothetical ones: Only when repeatedly gazing upon his favorite painting, Carolus-Durand’s “Sleeping Man,” in a Lille art museum does he focus and relax.
Ari’s eviction from his dad’s house cues a period of couch-surfing in which he’s forced to renew friendships he had left dormant, only to find, in most cases, that his friends are in no position to help him rebuild. Childhood pal Jonas (Théo Delezenne, in a brief, coruscating performance) has grown into a glib, reactionary finance bro, while their conversation reveals the class conflict always present in their friendship; the more bohemian Clara (Eva Lallier Juan) shocks him with her philosophical pivot toward embittered nihilism. Perhaps Ari’s own worldview is rosier than he previously gave himself credit for: Later encounters, with strangers and old acquaintances alike, revive his sense of his place in the universe, and rekindle his seemingly fluid sexuality.
If young men have never exactly been sidelined in the movies, they’re rarely examined with this degree of tenderness: “Ari” regards its subject’s many exposed vulnerabilities and self-sabotaging errors with a mixture of candor and protectiveness that feels close to parental. That extends to Sébastien Buchmann’s consistently close, intimate lensing, which often peers into Ari’s fragile, delicately pencil-drawn features with both affection and the scrutiny of an artist, or analyst. Even under this lens, parts of this character evade our understanding, and his own: “Ari” leaves him a hopeful work in progress.
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