‘Oh my God, did my dad and I fight’: Olivia Colman on the regrets triggered by new film Jimpa

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’ In 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. Cont...

Young Soul Rebels review – life-giving ode to diversity in silver jubilee London

Part thriller, part drama, part comedy, Isaac Julien’s urban pastoral set in the aftermath of a homophobic murder still feels fresh, buoyant and likable

Isaac Julien’s feature from 1991 is rereleased after more than 30 years and it still feels fresh, buoyant, likable and emotionally open. It is a paean to diversity and intersectionality set in east London during the 1977 Queen’s silver jubilee, with some cheeky jibes about middle-class outlaws and “St Martins” art-school types (St Martins being Julien’s own alma mater). Young Soul Rebels takes the form of an urban pastoral, but is also a kind of romantic comedy, a coming-of-age drama about friendship and a thriller about a brutal homophobic murder – and there’s actually a clever plot twist about the victim’s tape-deck which another type of film might have made much more of, maybe in the manner of Francis Ford Coppola.

A young black man is murdered while cruising in a park and the news has different effects on his friends, Chris (Valentine Nonyela) and Caz (Mo Sesay) who run a pirate radio station called Soul Patrol. Chris is stunned but Caz is all the more determined to throw himself into his music and maybe get them both a job on the local white-owned radio station, Metropolitan, which has a huge patriotic crown in the lobby and a life-sized cutout of the Queen, waving. (I’m surprised no one’s done that for King Charles.) Chris is angry that Caz is not as grief-stricken as he is, and pulls away from him into a relationship with stroppy white punk Billibud (Jason Durr); meanwhile, biracial and bisexual Caz faces bigotry from his black friends and he retreats from Chris into a new relationship with a production assistant at the radio station: this is Tracy, in which role Sophie Okonedo made a terrifically warm debut.

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