“Fortune favors the bold,” is a cornily-overused phrase that continues to be “overused” with purpose. Belgium’s Zoé Wittock could have scripted another lookalike coming-of-age teen romance. Instead, the daredevil filmmaker dares to explore a taboo-defying love story that wafts of concession stand popcorn and industrial lubrication oils in Jumbo. Intimacy posed as a malleable generality, still emotional, and attributed to internal pleasures versus external expectations. It’s cotton-candy sweet, visually poetic with a carnival’s neon-saturated exuberance, and without an ounce of “shame” to be felt by someone experiencing her brand of happiness. What’s so bad about being “weird,” anyway?
Jeanne Tantois (Noémie Merlant), an amusement park employee, is more excited than most for the funfair’s latest attraction: Move It. Customers see a stomach-churning spinny machine, but Jeanne sees a companion. Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot) wishes her daughter would find sexual awakenings with a man who won’t...
Jeanne Tantois (Noémie Merlant), an amusement park employee, is more excited than most for the funfair’s latest attraction: Move It. Customers see a stomach-churning spinny machine, but Jeanne sees a companion. Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot) wishes her daughter would find sexual awakenings with a man who won’t...
- 5/27/2020
- by Matt Donato
- We Got This Covered
Tall, dark and handsome? The crush that Noémie Merlant’s character, Jeanne, explores in “Jumbo” is one out of three: a 25-foot-tall carnival ride who seduces the amusement park janitor as she spit-cleans his bulbs. During the night shift, Jumbo literally lights up Jeanne’s life, and while he’s not handsome in the traditional sense — especially to the girl’s aghast mother — when writer-director Zoé Wittock admires his whirling spirals, he’s an undeniable attraction (albeit one Jeanne must share with 32 other thrill-seekers at a time).
In Wittock’s slender fable, the feeling might even be mutual. At midnight, when the couple is alone, Jumbo appears to communicate in grumbles and blinks — green for yes, red for no — as his radiant center pulses like a schoolboy’s heartbeat. Merlant, fingers tickling crystalline notes on Jumbo’s glass knobs, gazes back in awe. Her wide eyes look as full of...
In Wittock’s slender fable, the feeling might even be mutual. At midnight, when the couple is alone, Jumbo appears to communicate in grumbles and blinks — green for yes, red for no — as his radiant center pulses like a schoolboy’s heartbeat. Merlant, fingers tickling crystalline notes on Jumbo’s glass knobs, gazes back in awe. Her wide eyes look as full of...
- 1/25/2020
- by Amy Nicholson
- Variety Film + TV
Do you love your car? Or do you, um, love your car? And what if it loved you back?
“Jumbo,” a movie inspired by the real-life woman who married the Eiffel Tower, claiming she’d fallen passionately in love with it, is Belgian writer-director Zoé Wittock’s fractured fairy tale of a feature debut about a withdrawn young woman played by “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star Noémie Merlant, who develops deep emotional feelings for her local park’s newest passenger-spinning, brightly illuminated ride.
While it’s easy to imagine filmmakers from all parts of the outcast-fantasy firmament responding with glee at the cinematic doorways waiting to be opened if “Jumbo” shows post-festival life — Spielberg, Cronenberg, start your human-loves-thing engines! — Wittock’s film is ultimately more of a well-intended melodramatic experiment than a fully realized love story about one of the more curious corners of humanity’s sexual-psychological tapestry.
“Jumbo,” a movie inspired by the real-life woman who married the Eiffel Tower, claiming she’d fallen passionately in love with it, is Belgian writer-director Zoé Wittock’s fractured fairy tale of a feature debut about a withdrawn young woman played by “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star Noémie Merlant, who develops deep emotional feelings for her local park’s newest passenger-spinning, brightly illuminated ride.
While it’s easy to imagine filmmakers from all parts of the outcast-fantasy firmament responding with glee at the cinematic doorways waiting to be opened if “Jumbo” shows post-festival life — Spielberg, Cronenberg, start your human-loves-thing engines! — Wittock’s film is ultimately more of a well-intended melodramatic experiment than a fully realized love story about one of the more curious corners of humanity’s sexual-psychological tapestry.
- 1/25/2020
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
Jumbo
Belgian born Zoé Wittock promises to be a breakout director in 2020 with her debut Jumbo, (which the Sundance folks describe a “world of self-discovery and exhilaration for her literal object of desire“) a Belgian-French-Luxembourg co-production produced by Anais Bertrand, Annabella Nezri and Gilles Chanial. Her cast is headed by Noemie Merlant, writer/actor/director Emmanuel Bercot and Sam Louwyck. Thomas Buelens will serve as Dp.
Gist: Jeanne is a shy young woman who lives at home with her mother and works in an amusement park.…...
Belgian born Zoé Wittock promises to be a breakout director in 2020 with her debut Jumbo, (which the Sundance folks describe a “world of self-discovery and exhilaration for her literal object of desire“) a Belgian-French-Luxembourg co-production produced by Anais Bertrand, Annabella Nezri and Gilles Chanial. Her cast is headed by Noemie Merlant, writer/actor/director Emmanuel Bercot and Sam Louwyck. Thomas Buelens will serve as Dp.
Gist: Jeanne is a shy young woman who lives at home with her mother and works in an amusement park.…...
- 12/30/2019
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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