Karim Leklou chooses his family in the trailer for The Roman de Jim

After a run on the Croisette, the latest film by the Larrieu brothers, a melodrama about fatherhood, will be in theaters from August 14.

“Aymeric meets Florence, a former work colleague, by chance at a party in Saint-Claude in the Haut-Jura. She is six months pregnant and single. When Jim is born, Aymeric is there. They spend wonderful years together, until the day Christophe, Jim’s natural father, arrives… It could be the beginning of a melodrama, it is also the beginning of an odyssey of fatherhood.”

Presented at Cannes Première this year, Jim’s Novel is adapted from the eponymous novel by Pierric Baillypublished in 2021. Its trailer, to be discovered below, focuses on showing the stakes of a melodrama deciphering the ramifications of a family of the heart, but also, and above all, the construction of the identity of a father, a figure as symbolic as it is rational.

Jim’s Novel signs the return ofArnaud And Jean-Marie Larrieu on the big screen, after Tralalareleased three years ago, but also on the Croisette, after The Journey to the Pyrenees, presented at the Filmmakers’ Fortnight in 2008.

This is the first time that the director duo are tackling the melodrama genre after having explored musical comedy, thriller, comedy, science fiction, drama. On this genre, they specify:

“We were educated, as moviegoers, to be wary of emotion when it resembles manipulation of the viewer. But we felt mature enough to confront it. When Jim as a child says to Aymeric: ‘My real dad is you’we are in the emotion of the melodrama. But it comes from the actors, from their relationship to a situation. It is human material, gestures, a certain ‘truth’ that they bring about… and which surpass them.”

In the cast of this new film, no Mathieu Amalric in view, which nevertheless appears in the distribution of most of their feature-length fiction films. It is Karim Leklou who stars here as Jim’s adoptive father, fresh from the critical success of Vincent must die of Stephan Castangpresented at Critics’ Week last year, and nominated in the Best First Film category at the 2024 César Awards. Later this year, it will also be featured in Love phew of Gilles Lellouch.

By his side, Laetitia Doschwho also returned from Cannes where she presented The Trial of the Dog in Un Certain Regard. But before being a filmmaker, Laetitia Dosch is an actress who, according to the Larrieu brothers, “has this quality of being a pure actress who can give the illusion of not being one. She deploys her own acting music”.

Sara Giraudeau (The Bureau of Legends), Bertrand Belin (Love and Forests), Noah Abita (The Five Devils), Andranic Manet (First Case), Eol Person And Suzanne De Baecque (Jeanne du Barry) complete the film’s cast.

Jim’s Novel will be released in theaters on August 14, 2024.

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