Drew Burnett Gregory is back at Sundance bringing daily updates on the best of LGBTQ+ cinema and beyond. Follow along for more coverage or read her review of Jimpa below.
For decades, queer people have complained when films have cast us as a sidekick. So many movies and TV shows have flattened our stories into mere motivation for the growth of heterosexuals. And so what I’m about to say will come as a surprise: I wish Jimpa had focused more on its straight protagonist.
Jimpa, based on director Sophie Hyde’s life and co-starring her child, is about a filmmaker named Hannah (Olivia Colman) who visits her politically active gay dad (John Lithgow) in Amsterdam while working on a film based on him. Her nonbinary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) wants to move to Amsterdam full time to be around more queer people and live with their Jimpa (Jim + grandpa) and Hannah must figure out when to embrace conflict and when it’s time to let go.
There’s something rather tender about Hyde’s commitment to centering her father and her child in this story, an awareness that their experiences of their queerness matter more than how that queerness impacts her. But the point of view still remains with Hannah. This well-meaning attempt results in a film that lacks focus.
Even if you’re not aware of the film’s personal inspiration — I wasn’t until the end credits revealed the shared last name between director and costar — the film still belongs to Hannah. Because this fictional character is investigating her family to make a film, the film we’re watching inevitably feels like her own. And somehow this works! During the scenes focused on Hannah, I found myself taken with her emotional journey, feeling empathy for a cishet person trying her best to be supportive in a queer world even when that world has left her behind.
But during most of the scenes without Hannah, I was frustrated at the ways Frances and Jim’s experiences still felt filtered through this cishet perspective. The film overexplains its queer topics with scenes that will be educational for the uninitiated but tedious for queer viewers. The generational gaps between Frances and Jim are ripe for conflict but the moments of Jim’s biphobia and transphobia hold a maternal concern for Hannah rather than Frances’ own experience of that disappointment.
There are exceptions. Frances’ first sexual experiences are handled with an honest delicacy I’ve rarely seen in stories about trans youth and Jim’s realization that his career ambitions are moving beyond him is equally well done. But too often Hyde opts for an empty “queer joy” approach to the past and the present. When the film should be grounded in a moment, it instead cuts to montage. If someone watching this film had never met a queer person, they’d assume “dancing in slow motion” was what we were all about.
Ultimately, I wish Hyde had either committed to this film being her story or taken the risk to remove herself entirely. Instead, the film is in conflict with itself. It feels so indebted to telling every aspect of a true story that it lacks in structure and perspective.
Sophie Hyde’s previous film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande was a tender portrait of an older woman exploring her sexuality. In Jimpa, she once again approaches topics often ignored or sensationalized with curiosity and feeling. She has a worldview that’s easy to root for and I am rooting for this film to connect with the audiences who need it most. But by trying to be for everybody, the film ends up being for very few. There’s a version that could have been more specific and through that specificity connected with us all.
Jimpa is not included in the Sundance online viewing platform.
