WHILE NOT an LGBT event, the Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) always offers plenty of grist for this magazine’s mill. My annual dash around P’town turned up several films that I found worthy of consideration for review. Here’s the fourth of five.
JIMPA
Directed by Sophie Hyde
Closer Productions
John Lithgow stars in the title role—a portmanteau of “Jim” and “grandpa”—as a brilliant and flamboyant professor living in Amsterdam. He’s the grandfather of a nonbinary “grandthing,” as he calls the fifteen-year-old Frances, who has arrived in Amsterdam with their mother and father from their home in Adelaide, Australia.
We learn that Jim left Australia many years ago, having sired two daughters—one of whom is Frances’ mother Hannah (Olivia Colman)—in pursuit of a more tolerant environment after coming out as gay. Everyone is super-tolerant of both Jimpa and Frances, including the latter’s parents and Jimpa’s live-in personal assistant Richard. Hannah, a filmmaker who’s making a movie about her father’s colorful life, argues with her producers, insisting that it’s possible to make a film without a conflict of any kind.
A plot begins to emerge in Jimpa when Frances reveals that they have been secretly plotting to remain behind and live with Jimpa for a year—partly to escape their unsupportive school in Adelaide. Hannah responds with a mother’s concern and tries to get Frances to reconsider. Jimpa shows his age by expressing decidedly politically incorrect opinions on bisexuality and the word “queer,” causing Frances to have second thoughts.
What makes this film interesting is not so much the characters’ interactions in the present as the disclosure of their back stories through intermittent flashbacks in both Australia and Amsterdam. We learn how Jim came to live in Europe in the 1970s, becoming a gay activist and later turning HIV-positive; and how Frances came out as nonbinary and, in parallel fashion, resolved to leave Australia fifty years later. Whether that plan will be realized has yet to be determined.
