The Third Coast Review film team is on the ground at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and will be bringing you periodic dispatches with reviews on the latest in independent and highly anticipated films.
Jimpa
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of filmmaker Sophie (Good Luck to You, Leo Grande; 52 Tuesdays) Hyde’s Jimpa is showing us the vibrant queer community in Amsterdam. In a city so permissive of other pursuits, the open-mindedness of its population maybe shouldn’t be such a surprise, but the film embeds us in this liberal town through a family that includes Jimba, a gay grandfather (John Lithgow) who married a woman when he was a young man in Australia but came out to his family after he and his wife had two girls. The couple stayed together for more than 10 years before Jimba left the family in pursuit of more of an activist role in the gay community, especially during the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. Now, his oldest daughter, Hannah (Olivia Colman), is an established filmmaker, married with a child of her own, Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), who identifies as nonbinary and is considering taking a year off from Australian high school to live in Amsterdam with their grandfather, a decision that sends ripples through the family.
The biggest problem with Jimba is that there is no actual dramatic tension, which is ironic, since Hannah is working on a new film based on her parents’ life together, and almost everyone she tells their story to says there’s no drama in what is meant to be a family drama. The family travels to Amsterdam together, and it’s there that Frances meets Jimba’s older friends, who seem to do nothing but debate the use of pronouns, gender identifiers, the definitions of bisexual (Jimba doesn’t believe such a thing exists), and monogamy, which many of the characters don’t subscribe to. The bond between Jimba and Frances is strong, but he’s also a supreme button-pusher, and when he experiences a severe health crisis, the family needs their closeness to be part of the decision-making process about Jimba’s care.
Jimba can be heartbreaking at times, but it seems so obsessed with these conversations that we’ve heard and seen done better in countless mediums that it all feels like an attempt to surround us with goodhearted people who love each other despite their differing opinions and frequent, lifelong conflicts. I’m genuinely not sure what the point of this sometimes cloying exercise is meant to be. The result is largely spineless and self-congratulatory, and this community deserves something more complex with a lot more substance to elevate its thin premise. (Steve Prokopy)
The Ugly Stepsister
From first-time Norwegian writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt comes this gruesome retelling of the Cinderella story, done from the perspective of one of her stepsisters, Elvira (a breakneck performance by Lea Myren). From this perspective, the filmmaker has made the stepsisters (Flo Fagerli plays younger sibling Alma) more misunderstood than outright evil, with Elvira growing up obsessed with a book of love poetry written by the local prince named Julian (Isac Calmroth).
When word reaches the kingdom that a ball will be held so that Julian can scope out the local virgin population, Elvira is convinced this is her chance to finally meet and marry the prince. The problem is that Elvira isn’t as conventionally attractive as her stepsister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss), the daughter of the recently deceased man who married Elvira’s mother (Ane Dahl Torp); the groom dropped dead during the reception. She will eventually be reduced to playing servant to her stepfamily, giving her the name Cinderella.
Elvira’s mother sees a marriage to the prince as a money-making scheme and will do anything to improve her daughter’s looks, from a brutal nose job to shaming Elvira about her weight. The girl downs a tapeworm egg, which leads to an early contender for the grossest scene in any movie this year—I loved it. With The Ugly Stepsister, director Blichfeldt has taken this fairy tale back to its Brothers Grimm roots, and the results are often some truly great period (as in 19th century) body horror, with more modern commentaries on beauty standards, body image, social status, and the lengths people will go to achieve something resembling physical perfection.
And if you’re familiar with the lengths that one stepsister goes to to make that magic slipper fit on her foot in the original story, be prepared to see that play out in all its glory here, with Myren giving an absolutely staggering, full-thoated performance. (Steve Prokopy)
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