Director and co-writer (with Matthew Cormack) Sophie Hyde takes inspiration from her own life as daughter of a gay man and mother of a trans nonbinary teenager to tell the moving story of an Australian family on a visit to Amsterdam to spend time with the father and grandfather known affectionately as Jimpa.
Hyde most recently directed the Emma Thompson sex comedy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, which also premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. This one features an exceptional lead performance from Olivia Colman as Hannah, a filmmaker (think Hyde) navigating her experience growing up in a family where the father left after 13 years to find a new life as a gay man in Amsterdam. Now with a trans teenager, Frances (played by the filmmaker’s trans nonbinary child Aud Mason-Hyde), who is exploring her own identity and budding sexuality, they take a trip to visit Jimpa (John Lithgow), an aging but ever-so-eccentric and life-affirming gay man who hangs out with his also aging gay friends known as the “aunties” and representing a generation that survived AIDS and other calamities to try to put it all into context now.
Hannah also is trying to put things into context, as this visit is causing her child to want to find new meaning in their life and they announce plans to stay abroad with Jimpa for an year of overseas high school study. And why not? Jimpa is the walking billboard for a lifestyle he changed on a dime, perhaps at the expense of his own family and causing Hannah no end of confusion. Now, however. she finds herself the daughter and mother of two people determined to live their own real life.
Hyde uses her own life experience with her father Jim, who died at age 68, and Aud. She put her camera on this queer multi-generational family in a sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes complicated way in order to make a movie that aims to show LGBTQ+ culture in a way like any other family — human beings drawn together in joy and pain, hope and heartache. In other words: the stuff of life. There is a twist when Jimpa suffers a stroke and Hannah, ever the filmmaker, finds a way to tell her story to the immobile man who can still hear her and tentatively prove that by squeezing his hand “yes” and “no.” In this beautifully written scene, Colman simply excels.
Before that comes along, the film belongs to Lithgow, who gets one of his best outings in recent years as a self-centered man determined to do things his way, no matter the cost, but still with a loving heart. It is a splendid performance, one where the actor even goes full-frontal nude a couple of times as we learn he loves sitting around naked a lot. Mason-Hyde, playing in an area she clearly knows, is perfectly cast, but this is not autobiographical but rather a fictionalized tale suggested by the director’s own personal experience, one she is able to use her craft in creating conversations she herself never got to have with her own Jimpa.
With a fine supporting cast, Hyde proves that she knows how to get the best from actors and tell stories of pure humanity, even as some of these lifestyles are on attack in daily politics. This movie leaves that debate elsewhere. Above all else, Jimpa first and foremost is about family.
Producers are : Liam Heyen, Hyde, Bryan Mason, & Marleen Slot
Title: Jimpa
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Director: Sophie Hyde
Screenplay: Sophie Hyde, Matthew Cormack
Cast: Olivia Colman, John Lithgow, Aud Mason-Hyde, Daniel Henshall, Kate Box, Eamon Farren, Zoe Love Smith, Romana Vrede, Hans Kesting
Sales agents: CAA, Protagonist Pictures
Running Time: 2 hrs 10 mins
