Jimpa lovingly follows in the tradition of artwork about fathers who came out of the closet
- Written by Catherine Freyne, Senior Producer, Impact Studios UTS, University of Technology Sydney
Jimpa is an emotionally nuanced family drama by acclaimed Australian filmmaker Sophie Hyde.
“Jimpa” is the family nickname for flamboyant and provocative patriarch, Jim (John Lithgow). Born in the early 1950s, Jim came out as gay to his wife Katherine (Deborah Kennedy) in the late 1970s when their youngest child, Hannah, was a baby.
Instead of separating, Jim and Katherine improvised new rules for their marriage, raising their two daughters together for a decade, until Jim left the family home in Adelaide in search of wider social and professional horizons.
Now, Hannah (Olivia Colman) is making a film based on the story of her parents. She wants to show the courage and grace of the unconventional accommodations they made when she was growing up.
The time has come to talk to her ageing father about the project, so Hannah, her partner Harry (Daniel Henshall) and their teenager Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde) travel from Adelaide to visit Jim in Amsterdam.
Emotional terrains
At 16, Frances comfortably inhabits a queer, non-binary identity. They have long idolised their geographically distant grandfather for his courageous part in the struggle for gay liberation and HIV/AIDS advocacy.
Thrust into close proximity, Frances sees things about Jim that both complicate and enrich their perception of him. They learn Katherine had offered to leave Adelaide, too, so the family could stay together. But Jim insisted on striking out on his own: a move he now admits to Frances was “purely selfish”.
Over the course of the film, the family must reckon with the complex legacy of Jim’s choices – choices he made while attempting to integrate all his various roles and identities, which themselves shifted throughout his life and the passing decades.
Growing up with a gay father
Jimpa is inspired by Hyde’s own family experience. Her late father, Jim Hyde, was an important figure in Australia’s gay rights movement; her child, Mason-Hyde, who plays Frances, is also queer and non-binary.
Watching the film, I also found parallels with my family experience. My father came out as gay in 1994, and I identify as queer. Hyde has made a semi-autobiographical film out of her family experience. I made mine the subject of my PhD in history, and am now working on a book adaptation of my thesis.
We are not the first people to make creative work about the experience of growing up with fathers teetering at the threshold of the closet.
American cartoonist Alison Bechdel set the dazzling standard with her 2006 graphic memoir. Fun Home tells the story of her father, who secretly pursued his sexual attraction to adolescent boys and men, and his sudden death in 1980 at the age of 44. The book was later adapted into a musical.
American musician and actor Carrie Brownstein’s memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl (2015) talks about her late-to-bloom gay father.
Federal police officer and athletic strongman competitor Grant Edwards described in his 2019 memoir the effect on his childhood when his father left the family home in Sydney’s western suburbs in 1970 to live with his boyfriend.
Historical circumstances
These authors set their father’s deliberations over sexual identity in the context of broader public histories of sexual liberation and LGBTQIA+ community formation.
In Jimpa, this is achieved largely through the use of flashback sequences – there are dozens of them in the film. They have the feel of amateur footage captured on Super 8 film, slowed down to increase the effect of nostalgia, but nevertheless fleeting.
Instead of dialogue or diegetic sound, these sequences are poignantly scored. Sometimes they telescope personal histories – even minor characters are given this treatment. We see a glimpse of the child inside the man, the puppy inside the ailing dog. We see a flash of past contexts: a workplace, an airport departure, a new baby.
The same technique enables the inclusion of sequences which convey important historical context: a group of people stitching squares for the AIDS memorial quilt; a political campaign; a peer support meeting for partners of bisexual men.
Hyde’s film, and other works authored by the offspring of late 20th century gay fathers, show how the available categories of identity vary over time, in accordance with shifting social conditions and cultural change.
Expanding the scope of family intimacy
Jimpa makes a case for the intergenerational effects on Australian families when dads depart closets.
Despite the shadow of abandonment of both wife and children that is clearly part of Jim’s legacy, in the film’s moving final chapter, Hannah frames his decision to leave the family as “something wonderful” that “open[ed] up all their lives”.
Through a warm multigenerational lens, Jimpa posits the family as a pivotal site for the negotiation of LGBTQIA+ identities since the 1970s. It suggests these negotiations have expanded repertoires of intimacy and opportunities for individual flourishing in contemporary Australian family life.
Jimpa is in cinemas now.
Authors: Catherine Freyne, Senior Producer, Impact Studios UTS, University of Technology Sydney
