Le Roman de Jim

Aymeric, a young man in the Jura mountains, falls for Florence, who is pregnant by another man. He is present at the birth and raises Jim as his own across years of ordinary closeness. When Jim's biological father reappears and asserts a legal claim, the family Aymeric has quietly held together begins to come apart, and he loses a place he never formally held.

Reviewers noted the Larrieu brothers' handling of decades in compressed, unhurried strokes, the way the film moves through years without announcing each passage. Critics singled out its refusal of sentiment, Karim Leklou's contained central performance, later awarded the Cesar for Best Actor, and a directorial restraint that keeps feeling just beneath the surface rather than pressing it forward.

The film sets biological fatherhood against the fatherhood practised daily, and asks what constitutes the paternal function. It shows an attachment built rather than inherited, and the particular grief of losing a child to whom one holds no legal tie. What lingers is the asymmetry between law and lived kinship, and the durability of a bond that no record confirms.