Karim Leklou gives a touching performance in the lead role in Jim’s Story, a meandering French movie opening around Israel on Thursday.
Leklou won a César, the French Oscar equivalent, for playing Aymeric, a sad sack whose passivity threatens to ruin his relationship with the child he raised, in this drama adapted from a popular novel by Pierre Bailly.
The film, which was directed by the brother directing duo Arnaud Larrieu and Jean-Marie Larrieu, is long on literary narration and gorgeous rustic scenery. It was filmed in the Jura Mountains of northeastern France, the same region that was the setting for the recent movie Holy Cow.
Unfortunately, the beautiful setting is one of the few bright spots in a movie about a hero who is sweet but blank, and who fails to act decisively so many times that it’s frustrating to watch him.
It opens as he describes losing his first girlfriend and dropping out of university. Utterly aimless except for his passion for photography, he drifts into petty crime at the urging of his friends, and does jail time.
Once he is released, he meets Flo (Laetitia Dosch), a former co-worker at a supermarket. She is now a nurse and is gorgeous, friendly, free-spirited, happy to go to bed with him – and six months pregnant. The father is a married man, but she doesn’t mind that he’ll never be in her baby’s life. And Aymeric is only too happy to step in. He is enchanted by the baby, named Jim, and is involved in every aspect of his care. They live on Flo’s mother’s idyllic farm as they raise him together, and Aymeric instills in the boy a love of nature.
As Jim grows up, he’s as sweet and gentle as Aymeric, and the two are extremely close, walking through snowy fields and fishing together. When Jim wants to play on a soccer team, it’s Aymeric who signs him up. Flo is volatile and a bit self-involved, but Aymeric steps up, and his relationship with this child makes him as happy as he can be.
But when Christophe (Bertrand Belin), Jim’s biological father, shows up, the idyll is shattered. Christophe is a healthcare aide who used to work with Flo, and he is grieving the loss of his wife and daughters in a car accident. Soon, Flo is sleeping with Christophe and wants to tell Jim that her lover is his father. Aymeric, who never pushed the idea of him adopting Jim legally before Christophe showed up, feels he is being pushed out.
The dissolution, first slowly and later rapidly, of his relationship with Jim is the real subject of the movie. At every turn, he stands by, passive and often mute, as Flo makes all the decisions for the three of them.
'Jim's Story' is difficult to watch but worth it when finished
The narrative voice-over attempts to put his passive behavior into a context and to frame it as one more chapter in the life of a man who just lets things happen to him.
In the film’s best moments, this technique has a bit of the charm of the narration that iconic director Francois Truffaut used to use to add depth and a literary dimension to his movies, which revealed the character’s inner thoughts. But in Truffaut’s films, the narration hinted at emotion and conflicts not visible on the surface, while in Jim’s Story, everything feels as if it’s out in the open. The constant trope is that Aymeric only reacts to events, never taking decisive action.
Against all odds, the film picks up in the last third, when a surprising development causes Aymeric to take stock of what has come before, and the film begins to feel suspenseful. But it requires a lot of patience to get to this payoff.
Although Jim’s Story was shown in one of the most prestigious sections at the Cannes Film Festival, it plays like a glorified Netflix movie, and it might work better to wait and stream it at home eventually, although the vivid scenery will certainly look best on the big screen. But it’s puzzling that such a slight film found a place in a major competition like Cannes.