‘Jim’s Story’ Review: An Impassive Protagonist Weighs Down the Larrieu Brothers’ Sentimental French Melodrama

Arnaud Larrieu and Jean-Marie Larrieu’s latest film, “Jim’s Story,” doesn’t follow a Jim, but Aymeric (Karim Leklou). Rather, it is in following Aymeric’s story that the story of Jim unfolds. Which is to say, neither in title nor in its narrative structure does this French drama let its protagonist lead. This adaptation of Pierric Bailly’s novel of the same name (“Le Roman de Jim”) presents Aymeric as a rather inert character to whom events happen. His constant inaction repeatedly emotionally neuters this decades-spanning father-son melodrama, with a distancing effect that keeps its character at an unwelcome remove.

The story of Jim, of the person Jim will be, begins long before he’s born. It begins when his mother Florence (Laetitia Dosch) runs into an old co-worker of hers. Aymeric, she’d heard, had been serving time. Yet here he is now, seemingly unfazed for having taken the fall for a youthful misdemeanor that’s left him adrift, unsure of what’s next or what’s to come. Florence is six months pregnant and finds the affable Aymeric quite kind. Very much the opposite of the father of her unborn child (a married man who’s made it clear he wasn’t leaving his wife and kids for Florence). Soon, the two are moving in together and raising Florence’s child, Jim, as their own in her mother’s country house in the Jura mountainside.

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Theirs is an idyllic life. Or seems like one. The young Jim (Eol Personne), who we see soon grow into a confident, playful child, seems content with his life. He loves spending time with Aymeric, the only father he’s known and whose childlike, wide-eyed approach to the world around him guides and inspires him. But when Florence’s former flame returns to their lives and upends them, in turn, Aymeric struggles with what to make of a life that may no longer include Jim. The boy he’s raised as his own soon disappears from his life, only to return to him more than two decades later when secrets and grudges are unearthed for the older Jim (Andranic Manet) to make amends with the “first father” he once he knew.

Spanning close to three decades and squarely anchored on Aymeric, “Jim’s Story” is not so much a misnomer as a thesis statement; it is Jim who gives shape to Aymeric’s life, even, or especially, following his absence. As a narrative conceit, this leaves the protagonist of the Larrieu brothers’ latest feature to sit on the sidelines of his own life story. Every inciting incident that moves Aymeric’s plot forward feels as if it’s thrust on him. He does little to induce it, less still to fight it. When Florence admits she’s ready to start a life anew in Canada with young Jim and his biological father, Aymeric doesn’t protest. He doesn’t fight. He merely makes peace with her decision and finds himself at a loss for what to do when their communication eventually dwindles.

Aymeric’s impassivity very much sets the tone for “Jim’s Story.” He knows he often lets life happen to him: “I attract complicated stories and dodgy deals,” he tells Florence early on. And his is decidedly a complicated story filled with dodgy deals, but one he seldom reacts to. Leklou plays Aymeric almost like a holy fool, whose doe-eyed expressions rarely belie anything but passive bemusement. It’s no surprise Aymeric is constantly drawn to photography, opting at times to bear witness rather than take action; to observe rather than act; to chronicle rather than engage. And it is those photographs (their negatives, in fact) which visually dot the Larrieau brothers’ film. Those snapshots offer glimpses of the world as Aymeric sees it, of the life he’d once built with Jim and which, decades later, he’ll try to build back for himself and the son he’d been forced to forgo.

Barring those flashes of photography which overtake the screen for brief seconds at a time, “Jim’s Story” is told in an unsparing and unfussy way. Taking a cue from Aymeric himself, the film unfolds with a gentle ease that finds fluidity even when it’s telling a tale full of gaps. Even as it flashes forward years at a time, this French feature never feels stilted nor clipped — a testament to the capable work of editor, Annette Dutertre.

Instead, as a collection of pivotal moments in Aymeric’s life that depends, nevertheless, on their grounded mundanity, “Jim’s Story” is paced like a novel (here the French title feels all the more apt) and finds its most inspired moments in talky scenes where its characters — Florence, mostly, and later Aymeric’s later girlfriend Olivia (Sara Giraudeau) — voice interesting rebukes of what “normal” families and traditional life journeys can look like.

The various chapters of his life are meant to add up to an affecting portrait of a man, of a father, even. Yet Aymeric’s own often vacant expression — not to mention his seeming detachment from what takes place around him — robs the film of a more emotionally grounded center. What looks like gentle amiability at some points feels also like a lack of passion, a difficult core with which to build out an entire film around. And so, while “Jim’s Story” careens toward a sentimental denouement that plays with the tropes of maudlin melodramas (of family secrets revealed and fateful misunderstandings resolved), it cannot escape the sense of emotional detachment on which it rests.