LE MONDE'S OPINION - Masterpiece

In film, daring to be melodramatic, daring to be emotional, doesn't necessarily mean pulling out all the stops, creating flamboyance or a grand style. On the contrary, sometimes there's a form of understatement, restraint and euphemism that achieves the same result, bringing tears to the eyes. This is what the Larrieu brothers prove with Le Roman de Jim (Jim's Story), based on the book by Pierric Bailly, their leanest and perhaps most moving film.

As such, this new feature marks an inflection point in their joint work, which has been hedonistically good-natured, whimsical and lilting, as demonstrated again recently by Tralala (2021). This shift is first and foremost geographical: The brothers have gone to the East of France for the first time. And their wandering, vagabond tales are followed in this case by the straight line of a life path, with all its potential for directness and irreparability.

This path is the story of Aymeric (Karim Leklou), a native of the town of Saint-Claude in the Jura mountains on the border between France and Switzerland, from the late 1990s to the present day, spanning almost 30 years from erratic youth to maturity. A notoriously good-natured man, ordinary but not without qualities, Aymeric willingly lets himself be carried along by the tide and even embarks on a youthful burglary that lands him in jail. When he gets out, by chance he meets Florence (Laetitia Dosch), a former colleague who's a little damaged and six months pregnant, with whom he begins a love affair that puts him back in charge of his life.

She, a nurse, and he, a temporary worker, move to the countryside, where Aymeric welcomes someone else's child exactly as if it were his own. As the years go by, the surrogate father develops a close, privileged relationship with this little fellow named Jim (initially played by Eol Personne, then Andranic Manet). But then the biological father, Christophe (Bertrand Belin), turns up and gradually, almost imperceptibly, takes back his place with Florence. The ripple effect just as gradually pushes Aymeric out of the family picture. Their departure for Canada finally cuts the knot in this miraculous filiation, which owes nothing to blood ties. Aymeric finds himself on the brink, having to reinvent his life without "his" son.

The film's success lies first and foremost in the depth of time that the Larrieu brothers manage to infuse into the story, which is extremely linear, but whose linearity makes us aware of the irremediable nature of the course of a life, of what it gives and what it takes away. Scenes follow one another without ever being dwelt upon, as if the film were flipping through the pages of a family album, an impression amplified by the photographs Aymeric takes throughout, which are inserted in negative over the course of the movie – the still images serving as a full stop for the passage of time.

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