Adelaide Film Festival review: Jimpa
Adelaide director Sophie Hyde recruits screen heavyweights Olivia Colman and John Lithgow for a family drama that lands very close to home.
Goodwood’s Capri Theatre may not have drink holders attached to its seats like many modern multiplexes, but it does have an organ that rises from the pit of the stage floor, and someone to play for the audience as they crowd into their seats. It’s a nice way to open the Adelaide Film Festival, and the Australian premiere of Jimpa kept the good feels going.
In Jimpa, Adelaide’s Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays and Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) has produced, directed and co-written (with Matthew Cormack) her most personal film yet.
Adelaide-based filmmaker Hannah is trying to sell her new film, but no one seems to get it. What’s a drama without conflict? Does she seriously mean that a broken family can have a happy ending? Deepening the meta-narrative is the fact Hannah’s story is a tweaked version of Hyde’s own life.
Hannah and her husband Harry travel with their sixteen-year-old trans non-binary child Frances to Amsterdam to visit Hannah’s father, Jim, lovingly referred to as ‘Jimpa’. Frances, wanting to try out a freer form of themself than what seems possible in Adelaide, suggests they live with Jimpa for a year after Hannah and Harry return to Adelaide. What makes this such a personal film is that Hyde’s own father, who died in 2018, also left his family to live as a gay man and advocate publicly for gay rights, while her child is also a trans person. Jimpa becomes a poignant imagining of their meeting, of what could have been if only the timing had been different. What’s more, the actor who plays Frances is Aud Mason-Hyde, Sophie Hyde’s child.
The movie people Hannah pitches to throughout the film want to find the crack in her rainbow story and rip it open, force something painful to drip from the wound, but Hannah – and Hyde and Cormack – aren’t having a bar of it. They’re interested in spotlighting an intergenerational queer family in which people love one another unconditionally and are proud of one another, where they choose how to live their lives fearlessly, with openness and love and boundless support. Jimpa may sound like a dream, and in fact, it is.
You might like
Olivia Colman plays the quiet and gentle Hannah, while John Lithgow plays the flamboyant, tattooed Jim. These are two heavyweights of the screen, so I think we’re supposed to forgive their accents, and since this is ultimately a feeling film, it’s not so difficult to do. Shining moments include wordless snapshots of characters when they were younger, like momentary home videos that suggest this person you see here was once this person, and gay, bi, trans or not, they are the same person.
It’s especially affecting when you hear Jim say to Hannah that when he was a boy, he didn’t have the words to describe who he was, then indicates that Frances has “all the words”. Though this could be a point of contention – for what do pronouns and gender fluidity mean to an old man who only understands straight and gay, and gay is most definitely best? – it becomes a place of yielding and understanding.
Props to Kate Box for bringing some edge to the film as Hannah’s sister Emily. I think Jimpa was craving her messy, raw character for the first half, when we were still trying to work out if a drama could exist without conflict. It can.
Jimpa is currently screening as part of the Adelaide Film Festival, with a national release to follow