In praise of non-biological parenthood

In classic Hollywood cinema, maternal melodramas were common, films about women forced to experience motherhood distanced from their children because they had to atone for some sin. Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu create a contemporary, masculine version of this genre in Jim's Story, about Aymeric (Karim Leklou), a man who acts as a father to Jim, his partner's son, until she resumes her relationship with the biological father and they leave together for Canada with the child, leaving the protagonist behind. If in the classic maternal melodrama the woman was punished for straying from the ideal of a mother by breaking the prevailing morality, in Jim's Story Aymeric suffers from not complying with the institutional idea of paternity: since he is not the biological father, he cannot claim the right to continue seeing the child.

As Alain Guiraudie, head of the recently released Mercy, the Larrieu brothers represent a French cinema that seeks its identity far from Paris and the most Jacobin models, also when it comes to defending less constrained and more libertarian lifestyles. Their previous films, such as Coloring or making love (2005) and The last days of the world (2009), they explored the paths of Pyrenean comedy. This time they traveled to the Jura region, where Pierric Bailly's novel, which inspired the film, is also set, to unfold this story, starring Karim Leklou. The actor conveys an innate, but by no means merely passive, bonhomie, which imbues the profile of another model of fatherhood with meaning, one defined by its practice rather than by blood relationship. He is the center of gravity of this melodrama, which develops over a couple of decades and culminates, as in the classic genre, in a finale of emotional catharsis.