‘Ari’ Review: An Intimate, Energizing Character Study of a Teacher With a Lot to Learn
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic 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.
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