‘Jim’s Story’: Cannes Review

Dir: Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu. France. 2024. 101mins

The Larrieu brothers have built a career on a series of happy-sad human comedies, many of them featuring their go-to leading man Mathieu Amalric (Happy End, Tralala etc). Based on Pierric Bailey’s novel of the same name, Jim’s Story marks a small but significant change of direction. Starring Karim Leklou, a seasoned character actor whose melancholic face recalls Peter Lorre, this is a touching melodrama of fatherhood that depicts a relentlessly nice guy who somehow walks wide-eyed into an emotional catastrophe.

A bittersweet comedic drama

Set mostly in the rural Jura region of France – also the setting of Un Certain Regard title Holy Cow – Jim’s Story rambles its way to a gently moving pay-off. Intensely French in its geographical, societal and culinary landscapes, it should charm on home territory following its bow in Cannes Premieres, but has the potential to appeal to international audiences who are looking for a bittersweet comedic drama.

Covering 24 years from 1996 onwards, this isn’t really Jim’s story at all – it’s that of his father, Aymeric (Leklou). He’s a self-effacing drifter stuck in a succession of no-hope jobs, a mild-mannered university dropout with a passion for photography living in a small Jura village whose houses are scattered in the folds of a mountain valley.

Voice-over narration, especially in the opening sections, flag this up as a film with the flavour of a book (the original French title of both book and movie translates not as ‘Jim’s Story’ but as ‘Jim’s Novel’) and, like many books, it rambles before getting to the meat of the matter – which is Aymeric’s meeting with the free-spirited Florence (or Flo), a former supermarket co-worker played by the always watchable and expressive Laetitia Dosch. She’s six months pregnant, and happy for the clearly smitten Aymeric to hang around and – why not? – play dad to the father she calls Jim. But playing dad is not the same, he will discover, as being a father.

“I was like an actor,” says our awkward, lumbering hero in voice-over at one point, and that’s one of the real takeaways from this achingly true-to-life tale of ordinary people experiencing ordinary heartbreak: that, in the end, all we have are the roles we play. The photos of people that Aymeric takes but can rarely afford to develop flash up on the screen as colour negatives. What we see as reality can be turned inside out, just as Aymeric’s world is gradually upended when Jim’s depressive biological father Christophe (Bertrand Belin) arrives on the scene.

Into the void steps Olivia (Sara Giraudeau), a French teacher with a passion for dancing who asks little of Aymeric except affection and support. Her independence is a caring one – unlike Flo’s, which fails to distinguish openness from selfishness. Meanwhile, shot in natural light, the rural landscapes of the Jura shift from from snowbound winter to the cicadas of summer – indifferent to human woes, but also reassuring us that nothing stands still for long.