‘Ari’ review: Léonor Serraille delivers an engaging Rohmer-style drama

Dir/scr: Léonor Serraille. France/Belgium. 2025. 88mins

Lyon-born director Léonor Serraille, who gained the Digital camera d’Or for greatest debut in Cannes in 2017 with Montparnasse Bienvenue, returns to the fertile territory of younger individuals feeling their approach via life for her third characteristic, Ari. This loosely shot movie performs like a piece by Eric Rohmer, however with a definite Twenty first-century sensibility. Initially, individuals speak and speak, however extra advanced and engaging themes organically emerge in a movie that ought to see plentiful pageant bookings and probably even home awards consideration for Seraille, even when this sort of materials now hardly ever units the box-office on hearth. 

 Documentary-like authenticity

After debuting Montparnasse Bienvenue in Un Sure Regard in Cannes in 2017 and enjoying Cannes competitors together with her 2022 follow-up Mom And Son, a saga of Ivorian immigration in France, Seraille now premieres her third work in Berlin competitors.

The titular Ari (a mesmerising Andranic Manet) is 27 years outdated and a trainee instructor at a major faculty within the French metropolis of Lille. He’s a good-looking man with lengthy, soiled blond hair, angular options and blue eyes. However the younger man’s eyes all the time appear sort of unhappy, as if they’re all the time witnessing issues they don’t needed wish to see. And his manner is considerate to a fault, with a bent to overthink. 

Very early on, Ari panics when, in entrance of a category filled with noisy kids and a supervisor who’s making an attempt to assist him, he spirals uncontrolled, speaking about issues far more suited to an older viewers. The scene may very well be performed for laughs however Serraille and Manet current the protagonist’s sluggish undoing very severely, in one thing approaching the social-realist custom.  

The irony is that kids are Ari’s favorite individuals. “Children are the one people who find themselves roughly regular,” he says at one level. Maybe he feels so near them as a result of he hasn’t absolutely grow to be an grownup himself – which could additionally clarify the troublesome relationship he has along with his widower father (Pascal Rénéric), who complains bitterly about his son not taking any accountability for his actions.

Much like what occurred in Montparnasse Bienvenue, we don’t get a transparent narrative throughline however, as an alternative, a succession of scenes from Ari’s life. After the fallout along with his father, Ari visits varied associates and acquaintances. This results in loads of speak, a lot of it small, however, like in any good Rohmer movie, themes and motifs then begin to crystallise for these paying consideration. 

Ultimately, Serraille tackles nothing lower than the large questions of what it means to be alive in 2025 and the way one can discover and even permit oneself to really feel happiness in a world by which nearly the whole lot retains reminding us of the truth that individuals (and the planet) aren’t doing effectively. These youngsters of their twenties could also be extra sexually fluid and politically progressive than their mother and father, however that doesn’t imply that they’re spoiled brats or don’t have main questions on themselves and their future — and the way kids determine in all of that. 

Set in Lille, the movie has a working-class outlook – even when it was made in collaboration with one of the prestigious performing colleges in Paris. The forged, principally comprised of faces that aren’t straight acquainted, provides to the sense of documentary-like authenticity, with cinematographer Sébastien Buchmann’s milky closeups giving actors the house they should  actually let their work shine. There is perhaps loads of dialogue, however appears, silences, hesitations and facial expressions are sometimes simply as telling, if no more so.