After a three-year absence (their musical Tralala in 2021), Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu are back on the big screen with a new film, Le Roman de Jim, in theaters August 14, 2024. The film is an adaptation of Pierric Bailly's novel of the same name, published by P.O.L. in 2021.
The story spans almost 25 years, from the early 2000s to the present day. In the pastures of outlying France, in Saint-Claude, the sub-prefecture of the Jura, Aymeric(Karim Leklou), an unassuming young man, meets Florence, who is up to her eyeballs in pregnancy. With great tenderness, Les Larrieu capture the voluptuousness of this encounter between young, alternative people, and the particular, perhaps excessive, audacity of Laetitia Dosch's character.
Soon married, Aymeric naturally became stepfather to Jim, Florence's newborn son. And they lived happily ever after? Unfortunately not, as the child's biological father, Christophe(Bertrand Belin), upsets the family balance following a personal tragedy. From then on, this shaky family will try to function at the same speed, with the help of "shared paternity".
Although Jim's ballad - heard on the radio, of course, sung by Souchon - touches on the sensitive subject of fatherhood, the film left us strangely unmoved by the sentimental throng surrounding the child, as if it all sounded a little false. Although some are related by blood, others by love, the characters are unnaturally called by their first names, and all express themselves in monotone, without much joy or sadness.
The result is a great sense of strangeness, for while the film is not short on sentiment, here it's expressed too detachedly to touch the heart. Fortunately, the last quarter of the film, which marks the return of the now grown-up Jim to Aymeric's life, manages to be moving.
