Directed and co-written by Good Luck to You, Leo Grande’s Sophie Hyde, Jimpa is a story of want achievement on a number of ranges — typically to its detriment. The primary degree is its plot, which follows an Australian filmmaker, Hannah (Olivia Colman), taking her nonbinary teenager Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) to go to her idiosyncratic homosexual father, Jim (John Lithgow), in Amsterdam, as she begins work on a film that idealizes her household’s previous.
The second degree is the movie’s personal making. Hannah is a stand-in for Hyde, whose personal little one, Mason-Hyde, makes their on-screen debut in what quantities to a semi-autobiographical re-telling of Hyde’s household historical past, with some poetic license to depict conversations the household may by no means have earlier than Hyde’s actual father handed. These two meta-textual layers imbue Jimpa with intrigue. Nonetheless, their interaction is knowledgeable by a 3rd degree, which in the end kneecaps the film each visually and thematically. Its need to current a type of utopian queer acceptance, whereas commendable as a real-world finish aim, yields flattened characters who communicate in grating proclamations, and whose pasts are rendered mere flashes, which the film fails to emotionally anchor.
Jimpa turns queerness — as id, historical past, and lived expertise — into texture, however texture alone. In fact, it’s laborious to dismiss the movie outright, as a result of it’s extremely well-meaning, and since it attracts on a painful real-world story. However the way in which it expresses its intent, and its message about queer acceptance, finally ends up greedy at authenticity. The movie by no means finds its fact, leading to a painfully languid work that merely gestures towards actual drama.
What’s Jimpa about?
Jim — lovingly referred to as “Jimpa” by his grandchild — left his spouse and daughters a number of many years in the past. Hannah was 13 on the time, and he or she tells us within the film’s opening voiceover that her mother and father’ cut up was amicable and mutually supportive. Jim was a homosexual rights activist who felt constrained in Adelaide, Australia. He deserted his household for all times within the Netherlands at a time of burgeoning metropolitan queer tradition and group challenges just like the AIDS disaster.
Jim, perpetually single and nonmonogamous, additionally had a stroke just a few years in the past, and though he’s principally recovered, Hannah desires to take the chance for Frances to get to know him higher whereas they nonetheless have time. Frances is 16, nonbinary, and fairly positive of their id, however unbeknownst to Hannah and their easygoing father, Harry (Daniel Henshall), they plan to remain on in Amsterdam with Jim as an alternative of returning to Adelaide for his or her penultimate college yr. They solely reveal this to their mother and father whereas en path to Europe, organising a transparent dramatic throughline involving them attending to know Jim higher (whereas he guides them in the direction of discovering their very own sexuality and curiosity in polyamory). Nonetheless, the movie’s indirect relationship to battle muddles this image.
At quite a few factors within the movie, Hannah pitches a conflict-free drama about her father to numerous producers and actors over Zoom, stemming from her rosy view of the previous. Jimpa will not be precisely that model of occasions — Hannah’s film speaks to her avoidance of confrontation — however the true and fictitious movies are spiritually aligned. In Jimpa, drama is just too simply resolved or hand-waved away; individuals disagree at first, however come to an understanding with out a lot wrestle. Even when the movie presents emotional challenges (just like the query of Frances staying in Amsterdam, or how one can proceed when Jim’s well being inevitably declines), it additionally supplies clear conclusions, and few attainable deviations stemming from emotional impulse.
The resultant performances, nevertheless, are largely worthwhile.
Jimpa constrains its impeccable solid.
The ever-reliable Colman and Lithgow create a shared historical past the place the film fails to take action (narratively and aesthetically), owing to their dialed-in wit peppered with hidden vulnerabilities. Mason-Hyde, whereas sadly unremarkable in additional demanding scenes, carries themselves with an adolescent mixture of hesitance and eagerness. That is very true in Frances’ scenes of sexual discovery with one in all Jim’s bisexual college students (Zoë Love Smith), although the film is equally hesitant to seize the character’s expertise, and the flood of sophisticated emotions in its aftermath. It’s all too content material with having characters inform us about these feelings, fairly than exhibiting us how they may work by way of them in actual time.
Mashable Prime Tales
Jimpa’s dramatic spotlight, nevertheless, occurs to be Australian actress Kate Field. She seems in solely a few scenes as Hannah’s sister, Emily, however her troubled, rankled character supplies illuminating distinction to Hannah’s non-confrontational nature. Her prickliness is refreshing (and refreshingly human), as a result of no different character appears to have a damaging bone of their physique. Even Jim, who jests and jabs at Frances’ id (gender-neutral pronouns are a novelty to his technology), is a loving grandfather who’s mentioned to be provocative for provocation’s sake, albeit with out a lot thought from the film as to why he could be this manner, or if he feels conflicted about it (or how he feels about it in any respect).
Along with being a loving grandparent, Jim additionally fulfills the function of a queer elder passing down data and expertise to Frances who, although they’re the president of their college’s LGBTQ membership, doesn’t have a lot of a queer group to talk of. That is the place Jimpa not less than finds some semblance of educational worth; Jim is, in any case, a college professor, and he collects pins and buttons from numerous historic queer actions. Nonetheless, the film frames even its arguably important intergenerational conversations as a superficial string of buzzwords — as an illustration, about gender and sexuality being spectrums, with out observing what these spectrums would possibly entail — woven between fleeting historic imagery.
Jimpa is a blinkered story of queer historical past.
Among the most animated scenes in Jimpa come courtesy of Jim’s middle-aged and aged homosexual mates. Like Emily, this group — comprising actors Else De Lanooi, Hans Kesting, and Frank Sanders — seem solely in a handful of scenes, however have a energetic sufficient presence so as to add a way of queer historical past to Amsterdam. As a mixture of Amsterdam natives and transplants who got here up with Jim and lived by way of communal tumult, they’re all a part of his story, and thus, they pique Frances’ curiosity.
Nonetheless, the way in which the characters’ lives and pasts are portrayed robs this pal group of three-dimensional personhood. The movie’s use of flashback includes fast glimpses of moments whereas they’re mentioned in dialogue, together with bittersweet recollections throughout harrowing occasions, like weaving AIDS memorial quilts. However each excessive and low of those characters’ lives — together with Jim’s — takes on a Ford automobile business sensibility, with hazy, high-contrast photographs (normally of individuals dancing to no music) that really feel disconnected from each other. The identical strategy applies to Hannah and Frances’ flashbacks, with swift bursts of characters catching the digital camera’s gaze (in short, head-on shut ups), however by no means assembly it for lengthy sufficient to create a connection.
This glancing visible strategy is technically in tune with how Hyde approaches her story, whereby characters don’t a lot change concepts as they narrate pre-ordained speaking factors from the most recent spherical of social media discourse on queerness (as an illustration, a short, directionless conflict over how the phrase “queer” has been reclaimed by LGBTQ youth, however nonetheless holds painful recollections for older homosexual males). That Jimpa lampshades these conversations as acquainted is a meaningless gesture in the event that they’re nonetheless the film’s lingua franca and result in no actual self-reflection.
Jimpa, on this approach, finally ends up speaking by way of its broad concepts on queer tradition with out ever making them felt. The characters have a way of historical past, nevertheless it by no means feels totally lived-in, or painful, or joyous. It so not often feels human the way in which, say, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers does, a piece whose generational queer gaps are stuffed by wistful and painful drama. Moments of Jim handing down recommendation to Frances are harking back to Luca Guadagnino’s Name My by Your Title, wherein a father doles out life classes to his queer son, however Jimpa’s model of those swap emotional subtext for verbose soap-boxing destined to by no means click on — to by no means stir the soul.
Like a lot of the film, these exchanges are all textual content and no subtext — all phrases and no emotions — which is, satirically, a aspect of contemporary queerness and label-centric queer tradition that Jim jokingly decries. Moderately than discovering complexity or nuance by way of differing viewpoints and lived experiences, Jimpa merely finally ends up highlighting its greatest missteps, by way of meta-textual moments that nearly attempt to justify them.
Queer artwork deserves to be joyful and multifaceted, whether or not it’s highlighting oppression or just portraying the existence of queer individuals in atypical circumstances. Nonetheless, Jimpa tries and fails to separate the distinction, as a movie with smoothed edges that portrays self-discovery on autopilot.
The result’s a dramatic void. Jimpa’s confrontation of historical past turns into a sanitized expertise price solely a nod of acknowledgement, as an alternative of 1 that may instill affirmation within the face of prejudice or self-doubt. Hardly ever has there been a queer film that, on paper, appears so tender and politically needed, however finally ends up so eye roll-inducing in execution, fulfilling essentially the most anti-art calls for for representational drama sans battle or rigor.
Jimpa was reviewed out of the 2025 Sundance Movie Competition.
