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

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

Lyon-born director Léonor Serraille, who won the Camera d’Or for best debut in Cannes in 2017 with Montparnasse Bienvenue, returns to the fertile territory of young people feeling their way through life for her third feature, Ari. This loosely shot film plays like a work by Eric Rohmer, but with a distinct 21st-century sensibility. Initially, people talk and talk, but more complex and fascinating themes organically emerge in a film that should see plentiful festival bookings and possibly even domestic awards attention for Seraille, even if this kind of material now rarely sets the box-office on fire. 

 Documentary-like authenticity

After debuting Montparnasse Bienvenue in Un Certain Regard in Cannes in 2017 and playing Cannes competition with her 2022 follow-up Mother And Son, a saga of Ivorian immigration in France, Seraille now premieres her third work in Berlin competition.

The titular Ari (a mesmerising Andranic Manet) is 27 years old and a trainee teacher at a primary school in the French city of Lille. He’s a handsome guy with long, dirty blond hair, angular features and blue eyes. But the young man’s eyes always seem kind of sad, as if they are always witnessing things they don’t necessary want to see. And his demeanour is thoughtful to a fault, with a tendency to overthink. 

Very early on, Ari panics when, in front of a class full of noisy children and a supervisor who is trying to help him, he spirals out of control, talking about things much more suited to an older audience. The scene could be played for laughs but Serraille and Manet present the protagonist’s slow undoing very seriously, in something approaching the social-realist tradition.  

The irony is that children are Ari’s favourite people. “Kids are the only people who are more or less normal,” he says at one point. Perhaps he feels so close to them because he hasn’t fully become an adult himself – which might also explain the difficult relationship he has with his widower father (Pascal Rénéric), who complains bitterly about his son not taking any responsibility for his actions.

Similar to what happened in Montparnasse Bienvenue, we don’t get a clear narrative throughline but, instead, a succession of scenes from Ari’s life. After the fallout with his father, Ari visits various friends and acquaintances. This leads to a lot of talk, much of it small, but, like in any good Rohmer film, themes and motifs then start to crystallise for those paying attention. 

In the end, Serraille tackles nothing less than the big questions of what it means to be alive in 2025 and how one can find or even allow oneself to feel happiness in a world in which almost everything keeps reminding us of the fact that people (and the planet) aren’t doing well. These kids in their twenties may be more sexually fluid and politically progressive than their parents, but that doesn’t mean that they are spoiled brats or don’t have major questions about themselves and their future — and how children figure in all of that. 

Set in Lille, the film has a working-class outlook – even if it was made in collaboration with one of the most prestigious acting schools in Paris. The cast, mostly comprised of faces that aren’t directly familiar, adds to the sense of documentary-like authenticity, with cinematographer Sébastien Buchmann’s milky closeups giving actors the space they need to  really let their work shine. There might be a lot of dialogue, but looks, silences, hesitations and facial expressions are often just as telling, if not more so.