Ari marks Léonor Serraille’s third feature film, following Montparnasse Bienvenüe (Jeune Femme), that was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, and Un petit frère (Mother and son), that was presented in Official Competition at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.
The latest oeuvre by the French director landed the Competition of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival. The name itself is full of symbolic meaning, because Ari was the second son of Odilon Redon. This French symbolist painter returned to the use of colour with the birth of Ari, after a period of obscure artwork following the death of his first child. Once we are fed this information, the expectations on a cinematic protagonist bearing a name drenched with such significance are high.
The Ari in the film is introduced in an idiosyncratic way. We get acquainted with his quirkiness in a classroom filled with primary students. He is supposed to read a poem called L’Hippocampe (literally The Seahorse), that in French is also an allusion to the brain’s hippocampus. The grotesquely amusing factor is how Ari is explaining World War II allegories, neuroscientific references, as well as the biological dynamics of the species that has the male seahorse carrying out the pregnancy. The way Ari is incapable of adapting his discussion to a non-adult audience makes him a tender outsider. As the film progresses one gets lost on whether he is representing an emotional or behavioral disability or not. It turns out that isn’t the case. Ari simply represents the lack of anchoring typical of a twenty-seven year old. The filmmaker explained that during the preparation work for this project — assigned by the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Paris — she noticed how the common trait of the young actors she was going to direct was a sense of disorientation. Serraille mentioned thinking of the questions that sociologist Edgar Morin and anthropologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch asked in the 1961 documentary Chronicle of a Summer: “How do you live? What is your job? Are you happy? Is there something you believe in? What is your daily life like?”
Despite this profound existential premise, the result is tedious and at times even pretentious. Ari, played by Andranic Manet, is enthralling as a modern Dostoyevskian Idiot. But when we realise he is a sloppy, albeit sensitive, young man who does not take responsibility — but ultimately will — the entire house of cards alls apart. His friends mock him, his father (Pascal Reneric) pushes him to find a direction in life, which eventually happens when Ari’s ex-girlfriend Clara (Eva Lallier Juan), returns in his life with a surprise. This circumstance feels like a convenient deus ex machina, that solves the oblivion in which the film has headed.
In terms of camera work, Serraille does a beguiling job. She even included the use of 16mm film, to bestow a more visceral and organic approach in capturing the work of the actors. The choice of setting the story in the town of Lille and the surrounding region, is effective, as it confers allegorical depth to the film. In fact, when Ari sits at the city’s fine arts museum, contemplating for hours Carolus-Duran’s Sleeping Man, it mirrors his state of mind. Nonetheless these intellectually refined details do not suffice to save a flawed script.
Youth is undoubtably characterised by a feeling of angst, but this character is introduced from the very beginning as someone who is exceptionally socially awkward. Once we realise he is the simple metaphor for many, he loses his charm. The epiphany that leads to the culmination of a post-adolescent coming-of-age doesn’t work in this film, because the character is presented as out of the ordinary, and the minute he becomes conventional the film’s semantics crumble. The ebb and flow of Ari’s memories, and the sudden maturity that strikes him, out of the blue, makes the entire glorification of the misfit figure completely bogus. Therefore, Ari starts in a very intriguing way and gradually implodes like a soufflé.
Final Grade: C-