John Lithgow plays the gay and often nude septuagenarian father of Colman’s character in this bombshell-laden story of intergenerational queerness. She explains why her own dad would have ‘sat and cried all the way through it’
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n Jimpa, Olivia Colman plays a woman called Hannah who leaves Adelaide with her husband and 16-year-old child to visit her father in Amsterdam. This is Jimpa – the word sticks better once you know it’s a compound of Jim and grandpa. At the airport, the teenager, Frances, who’s trans, drops a bombshell: they want to move to the Netherlands and finish their schooling there. Hannah and her husband, Harry, respond thoughtfully, not freaking out.
But once they arrive in Amsterdam, Jimpa, played by John Lithgow, brings enough drama for everyone – something he’s been doing for 40 years, since he left his family for a fuller queer life than Australia at the end of the 20th century could offer. The film revels in revealing the sort of lifestyle he enjoyed instead.
“When I first met John,” says director Sophie Hyde, “he said, ‘Jimpa has to be naked!’ He was so sure about that.” And Lithgow, now 80, is exactly that in the film – although often just because he likes to model for life drawing.
