French film-maker Leonore Serraille has come to Berlin with a peculiar, unformed and unsatisfyingly developed feature, something that does not really deliver the truthful insights that seemed initially on offer.
Her spiky, funny debut Jeune Femme grabbed the attention — and her followup Mother and Son was a moving immigrant adventure. But this seems like an unfinished sketch for something that perhaps needed more development at the script stage.
Adranic Manet plays Ari, a highly-strung, sensitive, shiftless guy who in his late 20s is still living with his hard-working widowed dad and can’t settle down to anything. He appears to have dumped his girlfriend in circumstances which reflect very badly on him. Ari has recently flunked out of his latest attempt at gainful employment — as a primary school teacher — and when his dad finally throws him for his own good, Ari goes around talking to (and crashing with) a number of his old acquaintances, and finally makes contact with his ex-girlfriend Irène (Clémence Coullon).
The very beginning of the film is the best part, but also the most baffling. We see hopeless, hapless Ari, the trainee infant-school teacher, trying to interest his class of boisterous little kids in a complex poem he attempts to read aloud to them — under the eye of his exasperated instructor. Does Ari think he is addressing a graduate seminar? These are little kids, who are utterly uninterested. Poor Ari, under pressure, faints in front of the class. It is a hilarious moment, showing how hilariously — poignantly — useless Ari is at the job. It is after he quits that his dad throws him out.
But wait. Some other scenes, presumably flashbacks, show Ari being absolutely brilliant at the job: he has natural gentleness and creativity and instinctive awareness of what children want. The little kids love him. So what was going on?
It’s not clear. But what is clear that the subject of children is very important to Ari. Later we see Ari trying to reconnect with an old female friend who is pretty highly strung herself, and a male friend who is rich, obnoxious and careerist. Both these encounters feel like actors’ improv classes — and then the obnoxious rich guy, evidently remorseful at how mean he’d been to poor Ari, simply gives him the key to his flat by the sea, with an offer to stay there as long as he likes, an improbably generous gesture which is there to facilitate later scenes which themselves neither tie anything up nor leave them interestingly untied. Serraille is a hugely talented film-maker but this isn’t her best work.
