Writer: Sophie Hyde
Directors: Matthew Cormack and Sophie Hyde
For most 16-year-olds, discovering their sexuality and openly discussing it, their lack of sexual experience and ongoing considerations of their gender identity, talking about it openly with their mother but also with their grandfather would be deeply mortifying. However, for Frances it becomes the centrepiece for a coming-of-age story set in Amsterdam when an Australian family travel to Europe to stay with “Jimpa.” Sophie Hyde’s two hour film about the challenges between different generations of the LGBTQIA+ community, family secrets and the difficulties of finding space in the world whatever your age stretches credulity as it tries to work in a number of expositional arguments, but its reflections on family draw you in.
With a father who came out before she was a teenager, separating their family, the now middle-aged Hannah, a filmmaker, has never fully reconciled her feelings towards him. When her 16-year-old non-binary child declares a wish to live with Jimpa (a contraction of Jim and grandpa) in Amsterdam, the family visit with Frances who is encouraged to explore their sexuality with a local group. But family arguments surface and Jimpa’s strong views on sexual identity and gender come between them as Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) discovers the world away from her family.
Jimpa never quite knows what it wants to say and changes tack around two thirds of the way through. It begins with an intense debate about different kinds of identity rights between two generations of the same family, a little on the nose at times as Hyde’s dialogue is filled with rehearsed arguments on both sides, but the kernel of an idea about labels, the expansion of opportunity that came from earlier protest and the ownership over those new freedoms claimed by those that earned them, is all really strong.
A central scene involves Jimpa and his friends reject terms like “queer” and decide that they perceive a young acquaintances sexuality more clearly than they do. These discussions are insightful, the older baffled by the latest generation whose multiplicity of identities and self-determination that Frances represents, so the film could spend more time considering the implications of these differences when surface solidarity within the community has far greater age and circumstance-related nuance underneath.
Where Jimpa is far less successful is in wringing out the relationship between Hannah and her father, a man who lives on a different continent and who is the subject of her latest film. We get no real sense of Hannah as an independent person; she has a job but no real personality – even in Olivia Coleman’s quiet performance – so there is little weight behind the attempts to reconcile her father’s life even when played by John Lithgow. Scenes in which she mollycoddles her child are then contrasted with two unexplained occasions where they share a bath, and nothing explains the decision to place these scenes here instead of the kitchen or some other place.
As the latter part of the film shifts to health concerns, it is clear this is a personal, autobiographical story celebrating a man who lived a life full of battles for recognition. But it loses track along the way of its identity theme and its own individuality among many similar films.
Jimpa is available on Digital HD on 11 May. Distributed by Signature Entertainment.
