On the back cover of the book that the POL publishing house had sent them, a few words stood out: “When Jim was born, I was there. And then I stayed. We spent many wonderful years together, and I thought I would become his father. » By reading the summary of Jim’s novel, by Pierric Bailly, released in 2021, story of the life of a man who raises as his son a little boy of whom he is not the father, the brothers Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieu first imagined “a psychological narrative on fatherhood treated as a social subject”. In short, they say in unison, “a priori not for us”.
However, diving into the story refuted their prejudices and, a few months later, the film adaptation they made was selected for Cannes Première. This category was born in 2021 for, says Thierry Frémaux, “welcome the big names in cinema whose works do not necessarily meet the competition criteria”. Jim’s Novel, ninth feature film directed by the Larrieu brothers, which will be screened on May 22 (and will be released in theaters on August 14), marks for them the exploration of a new genre: melodrama.
Born in Lourdes in 1965 and 1966 respectively, Jean-Marie and Arnaud Larrieu had previously faced the comedy of remarriage (A man, a real man2003), to marital drama (Painting or making love2005), to the disaster film (The Last Days of the World2009), to the thriller (Love is a perfect crime2013) or the musical (Tralala2021). “We still have a lot of genres left to explore or explore: animal films, zombie films, westerns…” are they already salivating.
Filmmakers who are both literate and earthy
Self-taught, the Larrieu made their debut as kids in front of their maternal grandfather’s 16mm camera, who improvised amateur films in the 1970s, before making their first super-eight films themselves with friends. Later, once they had graduated in philosophy, the cinema courses at the Sorbonne in Paris, where their teachers were the critics Dominique Noguez and Alain Bergala, would serve as theoretical initiations. A conceptual background that they balance with a keen interest in nature, animals and bodies, making them filmmakers who are both literate and earthy or, as actor Karim Leklou nicely puts it, “real intellectuals but without the wrapping paper around”.
Since their first feature film, End of summer, in 1999, the brothers did everything together: writing, casting, location scouting, filming, editing, mixing, promotion. “On set, they don’t overplay the close-knit siblings, who could be exclusionarynotes Leklou, to whom Jim’s Novel offers an ordinary and moving leading role. They function like two professionals who work in pure camaraderie, including the world around them. The cute moment where we see them become brothers again, on the other hand, is in the canteen, where they eat lunch together every day. »
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