Jumbo, Or: How to Waste An Absurd Plot

Jumbo is a film I first heard about in the early months of 2020. As it made its rounds at Sundance and other film festivals pre-pandemic, the noise was: it’s a strange film where a young woman has a relationship with an inanimate object and has one of the actresses from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who is phenomenal. This was enough for me to insist that my partner not look up anything about this film and that we should both avoid trailers, spoilers, reviews, etc. until it came out (which happened finally in May).

Here is my spoiler free plot summary and review before we get to the issues I have with the film and how I’d fix it:

Jeanne lives at home with her single mother and is suffering from some pretty acute anxiety. Having finally reached the age where she is allowed to work, she’s decided she has always loved the amusement park in town and that it would mean a lot to her if she worked there. As a night-shift custodian, she is left alone in the park with all the rides. Fascinated by the big new tilt-a-whirl the amusement park recently acquired, she decides to climb its arm to clean the light bulbs and marvel at its mechanisms. She’s enamored by the machine and the machine, it seems, is enamored by her. It starts to respond and “speak” to her through a series of flashing lights and movements. She names it Jumbo.

Her mother, who has her own troubles and also works odd hours, is determined to get her a date with the park manager, who is young and handsome. The park manager is invited over to their house, he drives her home in the morning, and goes out of his way to talk to her. Her mother, who has also taken a new partner, thinks things are moving in the right direction for them both. But Jeanne’s love and further exploration of her own sexuality and romantic interests with Jumbo get in the way.

Unfortunately, despite it’s rather interesting premise, Jumbo fails to create believable character actions and wastes a lot of the thrust of the film’s absurdity on a rote and uninteresting story about a troubled daughter and her mother. Released in a time when films like Swallow and Under The Skin are taking body/object/horror to new levels, Jumbo falls more in the tone of an afterschool special than a film with anything meaningful to say about love and the ways in which emotion can sometimes be shelved into objects we find thrilling or attractive. Noémie Merlant, who plays Jeanne in the film, does a serviceable job embodying a poorly written and depthless character - but, and this will be a big part of what I would change about the film in a rewrite - barely speaks to anyone about anything. Because the character is alone for large parts of the film, falling in love with a silent object that communicates through flashing lights and big mechanical movements, Jeanne becomes shallow. Her actions don’t mean anything, especially towards the climax, and when the film ended I was left with the feeling that nothing mattered. The conclusion was predictable instead of inevitable. 

Here is where the spoilers and re-write start:

The problems I had with Jumbo can largely be summed up as: The plot choices made by the writer/director were not explored deeply and, as the audience, we were not given someone to discover Jeanne through. It is obvious that the anxious main character, who has spent a lot of her life in her room building models of the theme park rides, is lonely. It is obvious she lives with her mother, who is a broken person after a recent (?) divorce, and that they don’t really know each other. 

The predictable nature of the plot rolls out like this: While her mother is proud that she is now working and out of the house, she wishes her daughter were normal. Jeanne, who has happily found love with Jumbo and is fulfilled for the first time in her life, exposes this relationship to her mother (who she thought she could trust for some reason). Her mother rejects it, destroys her room and causes her to run away (kind of). She returns and her mother accepts her thanks to the new happiness/relationship she also has recently found. Jeanne and Jumbo get “married” while the mom’s boyfriend beats up some kids who were teasing her. The end. The moral being: people find happiness differently than you and you can’t help who or what you love.

Sounds interesting enough. Typical story. We all want acceptance. But where this movie fails is in creating an environment or any character where the change from not-accepted to accepted is felt to be a monumental shift between the two parties. The absurdity of falling in love with a big tilt-a-whirl (and having sex with it) is wasted by an after-school level of character depth and action. There was never a point where I felt it was necessary that the mother accept Jeanne’s odd behavior or love, so when it finally happened the impact was very low on the emotional relevance scale. 

How do you fix this?

There are two big problems with the writing of this film: 1) The main character is almost always alone (especially at the park at night), and 2) the absurd elements happen in act one, which deflates the actual crisis/climax of the film when it happens. If your pitch is: troubled young woman falls in love for the first time, but it’s with a machine! I expect that to be the emotional crisis of the film. What the hell is going to happen? How will she live her life in love with a ride at a seasonal theme park? What if the town finds out? What if her MOM finds out? To be fair, some of the climax revolves around “what if the town finds out,” but because the plot is very rote it also becomes “will my mom be convinced that I am in love?” and “will Jeanne be sent to a mental institution?”

Problem #1: the main character is almost always alone

One of the elements of this film that I think would be fairly easy to fix, if you were doing a page 1 rewrite, would be to add a character who also works at the park to help explain some of the things that are poorly shown, or briefly mentioned, about Jeanne. By adding a friend you create a vehicle for late night conversations and a springboard for tension. A character can still be anxious and troubled and lonely while not always being alone. So you have a few options of course, but in order to accelerate this film into the artsy emotional film it wants so badly to be, I believe this friend character needs to be: a) a best friend from school who Jeanne is secretly romantic for but has never pursued and b) someone who leaves suddenly. By making this new character someone who is already a friend you create the opportunity for deeper conversations (or any conversation at all) that don’t need to fully explain why Jeanne is the way she is. It creates space to talk about the troubles she is having without having to explain their origin. As someone who she feels great affection for, this character could become the romantic interest of Jeanne that is unrequited - forbidden, uninterested, lusted after. So when the new character leaves, all of that pent up pubescent energy can be suddenly transferred to the object - the exciting new, flashing, and powerful Jumbo. By removing the object of her affection and replacing it with a literal object, the absurdity has purpose. The lonely, troubled young person, who is perhaps waking for the first time to her own intimacy, misdirects her love/sex/lust onto something wild. Something weird and exciting. 

Problem #2: The absurd elements happen in act one, which deflates the actual crisis/climax of the film when it happens.

The crisis/climax of the first act (which becomes the thrust for the inciting incident of the second act) is: Will Jeanne actually have sex with this machine, which has somehow come alive? Yes. She strips. She licks the machine oil from the hydraulic joints. She enters a white portal where she is slowly covered with black goo (very similar to Under The Skin). She masterbates while being held up by the machine, high into the sky with the city lights in the background. Yes, she has sex with the machine. 

After this happens in the first ~20 min or so you think: holy shit. This movie is going to be wiiiiiilllldddd if they’re doing this early in the plot. But it’s not. Afterwards we return to the human world filled with very common human problems. After the park manager finds out that she is literally making out with this machine, he announces in front of the entire town that the machine is being sold away. Jeanne shows her mom her “boyfriend” and her mom is confused and pissed - threatens to send her to an institution. Jeanne has sex with the park manager to try to experience what real love/sex is, but it’s terrible. But none of that really matters because in the end all Jeanne needs is the acceptance of her mother and to be literally married to this machine (before it is sold off...). 

Okay. So how do you fix this?

By solving Problem #1, you create a solution for Problem #2. The crisis / climax of the first act becomes the crisis / climax for the entire film instead (or even the ending - she finally goes off the deep end, she finally has sex with the hot twirly machine). The absurdity is pushed to the climax because it is where all the tension lies in the pitch. The entire time you’re thinking: when is this lady going to make love to that machine? It’s in the description. It’s the one thing this movie is about. But what if it wasn’t? What if the movie was actually about how we harbor feelings and when those feelings are unrequited we push ourselves further into our existing insecurities and pains? What if instead of a missing father we had a missing early crush? What if instead of a troubled mother leading us into a troubled daughter we had the secret actions of a troubled young person who was just trying to find love, goddamnit!? Remove the mom’s performative sexuality and crude jabs; remove the stand-in father figure (mom’s boyfriend); and develop the main character so that when she is naked in the very first scene, and then later has sex with a machine, we know why. We are there, as awkward as it is, in repulsion or rejoicing, with her. By seeding in the absurd implications of the pitch throughout the film, instead of all at once, we create tension and mystery. Is she imagining it? Is the machine really responding to her? 

Horse Girl, written by Jeff Baena and Allison Brie, creates a similar plot and executes it really well. At many points in the film the main character is wondering: Is this real? Am I losing it? Does anybody hear me? As the audience, we’re there the whole time. We see what Allison Brie’s character sees. We are given small glimpses into the absurd in each act, escalating in length and excessiveness, until: boom, the story climax - full tilt insanity (maybe?). The tensions are reserved, built up, then released slightly, then doubled back on even harder. 

In the end, Jumbo is a fine movie that I had high hopes for. It uses an absurd premise to bring in an audience but fails to deliver on an impactful plot. It definitely delivers on the absurd premise, but for what reason? If the first act were a short film, it would be slightly better.

Jumbo is a french drama film from 2020, which was written and directed by Zoé Wittock, stars Noémie Merlant, Emmanuelle Bercot, and Bastien Bouillon, and can be found on VOD.