Ultimately, not even the powerful combination of Lithgow and Colman can rescue Sophie Hyde’s directorial misstep with Jimpa, a movie that never truly finds its dramatic, historical or contemporary queer voice.
Australian director Sophie Hyde has brought us some truly great films, from the stunning and powerful In My Blood It Runs, as producer, to the bold and brilliant Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, as director. There are moments of her previous brilliance in her latest film, Jimpa, especially as it attempts to uncover the changing queer experience, using all-too-brief flashbacks to explore history, memory, progress, and regress. Still, these brief moments are thwarted by a movie that meanders and quickly loses its audience.
Alongside a wonderful cast that includes John Lithgow, Olivia Colman and Daniel Henshall, there is an intimacy at the heart of Jimpa that is undoubtedly the movie’s biggest strength. Australian filmmaker Hannah (Colman) is about to make an autobiographical drama about her life growing up with a father who was openly gay and a mother who accepted his sexuality without conflict in building a loving home. Jim or Jimpa (Lithgow), a vivacious campaigner and academic, came out just after Hannah was born, and then left Adelaide when Hannah was a child to pursue a career in Amsterdam, where he has lived ever since. Hannah’s film aims to celebrate his courage while exploring the no-blame, no-conflict family environment of her childhood. Yet every actor she auditions appears intent on finding a conflict in her story!
At the same time, Hannah’s child, Frances, played by Sophie Hyde’s own child, Aud Mason-Hyde, is navigating their own queer coming-of-age journey as they attempt to find their true self as a non-binary young person with a loving and supportive family, in a city that feels like it’s suffocating them rather than opening doors to self-expression and freedom. Frances often feels that the only person who truly understands them is Jimpa, their distant grandad, who lives by his own rules. As the family fly out to Amsterdam to visit Jimpa, Hannah and her husband know that Jimpa is a complex person: fiercely intelligent, yet self-indulgent, compassionate yet argumentative, and at times cold. They also know that Frances will likely want to stay, but also fear that, through her teenage eyes, Frances may discover that Jimpa isn’t the idol she has celebrated from a distance.
As stated at the beginning of this review, Jimpa offers moments of brilliance, particularly in Hyde’s use of flashbacks to explore intergenerational queer experience and the ever-changing landscape of sexual and gender identity. Had these flashbacks been further developed, Hyde’s film could have become a truly stunning exploration of time, movement and memory. However, while these themes sit at the heart of Matthew Cormack and Sophie Hyde’s screenplay, Jimpa is ultimately a muddled mix of a queer coming-of-age story, a broader family drama, artistic discussions of conflict and memory, and the intergenerational LGBTQ+ experience.
Performances do, as you would expect from such an accomplished cast, go a long way toward healing some of the narrative and creative problems in this jumbled picture. But, ultimately, not even the powerful combination of Lithgow and Colman can rescue Sophie Hyde’s directorial misstep with Jimpa, a movie that never truly finds its dramatic, historical or contemporary queer voice.
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