‘Jumbo’ review: Dir. Zoe Wittock [Sundance]

Jumbo review: This Loop-de-loop, off-the-rails love story is totally off its rocker, but also one of the most tender and honest coming-of-age stories that we could see this year.

Courtesy of Sundance Institute

In Spike Jonze’s Her, Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson’s voice portray a burgeoning love between a physically anonymous, ambiguously sentient piece of technology and a lonely man. In Claire Denis’ High Life, Juliette Binoche boldly committed to a long-form, slow-motion display of one-way sexual tension with an inanimate chair.

Both are landmark moments in cinema when directors and actors pushed the boundary of commercial love stories into taboo terrain, and there found intriguing answers about psyche, attraction and what constitutes connection. They also veer wildly in tone. Premiering this year at Sundance, Writer-Director Zoe Wittock’s masterful Jumbo lands the bullseye perfectly between the both.

JUMBO is a ride — as a character and a film. The newest instalment in an amusement park manned by young adults toiling for pocket-money, this new-fangled attraction finds itself on the receiving end of the attentions of Jeanne (Naomie Merlant), a devastatingly shy, socially awkward employee. When Jumbo stirs itself to save Jeanne’s life after she slips off a metal arm when cleaning it on a night shift, their relationship deepens. That’s right, this romantic dramedy is based on the real-life reports from a few years back: a woman who got the world’s attention when she legally married a fairground ride.

Objectiophilia may have been one of the last impossible taboos to work with in a serious, artistic, sincere film such as this. But Zoe Wittock’s vision is revelatory. With Jumbo, she shakes hands with the utter weirdness of the story, keeping humour centre-fold (a sequence where Jeanne ‘introduces’ her new hunkering beau to her mother by strapping the screaming woman into a solo spin is hilarious) but as much as she is unafraid to acknowledge the insane circumstance, she also embeds what was once a salacious headline with so much more meaning. Or perhaps meaning was there in this infamous real-world ‘partnership’ all along.

Some beautiful imagery of Jeanne, with a beaming smile lit luminously in JUMBO’s neon atmosphere, is as affecting as an embrace. Meanwhile, characters chat about the idea of a ‘soul’ (is it something that can be projected onto others, or ‘stuck’ on with attention?) with such marvel and vulnerability. It only takes the first act of the film before Wittock has made it easy enough to suspend disbelief, strap in, and accept that you are about go along and take this extraordinary tale as a mediation on love and companionship, like any other rom-com.

For that, lead actress Naomie Merlant was also vital. Having shown off her incredible pining expression in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, she elevates the game here. It takes a special kind of actor to solo-charge a movie’s worth of chemistry, yet she does. Where she has had other talented peers to bounce her emotions off of before, here the love story is bought and sold on the gentle, one-sided affection she projects when manning her beloved fairground ride. While she is on visibly pained tenterhooks with her contemporaries — particularly a manager who chases her attention with inappropriate persistence — she transforms so utterly with JUMBO that you’d feel guilty to deny her this one solace. The film has something to say about a modern young woman; seeing Merlant’s delicate, burgeoning joy under the shelter of a politely passive inanimate soulmate is believable after you watch her squirming under aggressive male gazes. Boys versus toys, as it were.

While Naomie Merlant does the heavy lifting in terms of this relationship, that’s not to say that JUMBO isn’t a brilliantly rendered presence. The care and detail that has gone into its sound design and movements is reminiscent of a Guillermo Del Toro monster; it beeps, bops and chatters like a Droid, but unfolds and perks up with the lumbering benevolence of an ancient cyclops. And overall, the creative choice to get in Jeanne’s head by literally making the machine move and ‘talk’ in her company is what makes this film hold onto both its bizarro comedy and its pathos for the wonder this unique person must have felt when falling in a strange love. It is, overall, a magnificently mischievous turn of expectations. A film that laughs at the lunacy inherent to the human experience of love and sexuality, that still earns its rollercoaster of feelings. The importance to Jeanne for her and JUMBO to have the blessing of her hotheaded mother (a gleeful and affectionate turn by the brilliant Emmanuelle Bercot) grounds the whole thing in a touching place of yearning.

You might have gone in expecting to judge Jeanne, instead you’re in her shoes; in turn baffled and entertained by JUMBO’s and its dizzy, magic, anthropomorphic world.

Zoe Wittock has attacked every nook and cranny of the subject with such unapologetic ferocity, even down to Jeanne’s hobby of building a harem of metal trinkets that whizz and burr in the background of serious house-hold arguments about acceptance. This film is extremely weird, unflinching, and above all, wise — like its heroine — so much so that’s it a zap to the senses. And as Jeanne struggles to hide her obsession and the reaction of the world edges in ever closer, and kids just want to take a ride without Jeanne clinging to the thing, audiences will be hard-pressed not to shriek with horrified delight.

Jumbo was reviewed at Sundance 2020.