Jimpa – Movie Review
An incredibly personal film from Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde and actor Aud Mason-Hyde, Jimpa is a tender coming-of-age tale about familial relationships, queer identity, and navigating life as parents.
Tender, intimate stories are no strange land for Sophie Hyde, whose last film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande saw Emma Thompson in her most emotionally and physically raw performance to date, as Hyde and frequent screenwriting collaborator, Matthew Cormack, explored sexuality and the desire for connection later in life.
In Jimpa, sexuality, connection and relationships are once again the foundation for cinematic exploration, this time told through three generations of a family. Olivia Colman plays Hannah, a screenwriter who is attempting to sell a new story based on her father, Jim (John Lithgow). Jim is a gay man living in Amsterdam, who came out after the birth of Hannah and her sister. Jim is also affectionately known as ‘Jimpa’ to his grandchild, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), a non-binary teenager who wants to live with Jimpa in Amsterdam for a year.
This interconnected story follows these three characters as they deal with the their own versions of coming-of-age, and being such a personal story for both Hyde as an artist and a parent (drawing parallels to Hannah’s story in the film), who also has a gay father in real life, as well as Frances’ journey in embracing their identity being drawn heavily from Aud Mason-Hyde’s experiences, there is a gentleness in the way these relationships are explored that is quite heart-warming and inviting.
The conflict of the relationships in the story have an interesting cascading generational effect. Conversations that Jimpa has with Hannah and Frances are often criticising current queer culture (“there’s no such thing as bisexual”), while Hannah tries to dig deeper into the her father’s journey with his own sexual identity to help find the story for her next film, and understand her child’s own queerness more. Frances takes such a liking to Jimpa and Amsterdam as they grow into a community that openly expresses and discusses queerness in a way that they haven’t been able to experience in Australia. Watching each of these characters engage with each other, trying to find ways to explore these respective journeys with familial love, feels incredibly sincere.
However, where Jimpa as a film doesn’t succeed in being a moving piece of art is that these character journeys feel preachy more than they feel explorative. The premise itself should seem to lend to the deeper exploration of these themes, but the certainty of everyone’s feelings about their identity doesn’t really allow for a lot of emotional depth to be reached, even in the face of conflict. And even in saying that, the conflict doesn’t ever get to a point that feels engaging in a cinematic way. No one feels entirely changed by the end of the film, and that causes the film to drag on monotonously.
It’s not that the story itself isn’t sincere and heartfelt and the real-life inspirations that fuel the narrative and characters would make for quite meaningful conversations in the room with these people. But as a film, it is simply just boring.
Jimpa is in Australian cinemas February 19
