Jumbo: an erotic story about a woman falling in love with a rollercoaster

It’s a tale as old as time. Girl meets boy. Girl meets amusement park ride. Girl emotionally and erotically obsesses over the Tilt-A-Whirl machine, much to the heartbreak of her mother, and returns each night for a pleasurably bumpy ride. Does size matter? With this fairground attraction, it doesn’t hurt.

In Jumbo, the debut feature from Belgian writer-director Zoé Wittock, there are sparks. And then there are sparks. Yet despite its absurd premise, Jumbo is relatable on a human level. The sad, sensitive, French-language coming-of-ager explores grounded themes such as loneliness, peer pressure, and the inevitability of disappointing your parents. Even the central romance isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. In 1979, a Swedish woman married the Berlin Wall and coined the term “object sexuality”; in 2007, Erika Eiffel, a one-time Olympic archer, married the Eiffel Tower, took her new partner’s surname, and established OS Internationale as a support group.

“For me, Jumbo is a modern fairy tale, indeed with kinkiness to it,” says Wittock, over Zoom from her home in Paris, in late February. “To be honest, the first thing that intrigued me about the subject was the sexual aspect. But when I started talking to Erika, I realised this was a love story.” In the writing stages, Wittock consulted Eiffel and other objectum sexuals. “For these people, it starts with an emotional connection, and then occasionally transpires to a sexual relationship. But it’s not always the case. That’s what I’ve been told by the community, and I wanted to respect that.” When Jumbo screened at Berlinale last year, Eiffel attended the premiere. “Erika came up to me afterwards, and was like, ‘This is crazy. There’s dialogue I hear my mum tell me!’”

The Erika Eiffel of Jumbo is Jeanne, an introverted, 20-something woman played by Noémie Merlant of Portrait of a Lady on Fire fame. By day, Jeanne’s asleep; at 6pm, she’s woken up by her mother, Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot), for a night shift as an amusement park cleaner. At Jeanne’s workplace, the elusive new colleague defying her to break HR guidelines is Jumbo, a “Move It” ride with metal arms and chair-shaped fingers; he showcases the composure of Robert Redford, the prettiness of Timothée Chalamet, and the loud, clanging mating call of a washing machine.

Jeanne soon discovers that Jumbo is the perfect boyfriend: he’s a good listener; he’s unlikely to run away; and, as she boasts to her mother, the literal love machine dispenses orgasms at the push of his button. Parents rarely want the blow-by-blow account of their child’s sex life, but this confession reduces Margarette to tears.

Beforehand, Margarette joked that vibrators make better husbands than men; it foreshadowed her eventual belief that her daughter is dating an XXL sex toy. Wittock explains, “From an outsider’s point of view, our first impression is: ‘Why is she into that object? Is that one big dildo she can get a kick out of?’ But for Jeanne, it’s a different kind of object that has a soul, which is obviously not the case for Margarette’s vibrator.”

According to Eiffel, who resides in Berlin, most of the hostility she receives is from the US, the UK, and Australia; Europe is otherwise more welcoming. “My first instincts were to make Jumbo in the US, but for personal reasons I wanted to head back to Europe,” Wittock recalls. “It felt like I would have much more freedom here.”

Wittock grew up in Belgium, Africa, and Australia, then studied directing at AFI. While living in America, she wrote Jumbo in English. American producers, she sighs, fixated on the sex; in Europe, financiers were seduced by the mother/daughter dynamics. The resultant film is a Belgium-France-Luxembourg coproduction. “I translated it into French and adapted it to the Ardennes in Belgium. The park is in the middle of nowhere, with this waterfall and extraordinary landscapes. There’s something magical about it.”

The Ardennes backdrop is particularly effective when placing Jeanne with Jumbo in the same frame; all that empty space on the screen indicates there aren’t any late-night intruders. Subsequently, the Jumbo we see is the Jumbo Jeanne sees: he communicates via red and blue lights; at the height of passion, the oil spillages are an indication he enjoyed himself. “I wanted Jumbo to be big, because when something looks at you from above, it impresses upon you emotions you can’t control or handle,” Wittock says. “We cast a real Jumbo, and transformed it from automatic to manual. The ride speaks with light, smoke, speed, and movement. We had a team of five people responding to Noémie as she was moving and acting. I could play with it as a puppet.”

“I wanted Jumbo to be big, because when something looks at you from above, it impresses upon you emotions you can’t control or handle” – Zoé Wittock

In most cases, objectum sexuals refer to their partners with pronouns, not “it”. From early stages, Wittock decided it would be a female human and a male machine. “It resonated with me more because Erika is a woman. I really wanted to explore a female’s sexuality and desire, rather than a man’s, because I felt closer to it.”

There are two sex scenes in Jumbo; one is cold and mechanical, the other is with Jumbo. Wittock, though, would rather keep the details of the woman-on-machine romp a surprise for viewers, other than that it’s fantastical: “What matters is that she feels it, and believes in it. Showing that awakening as a first orgasm, and a more poetic representation of that orgasm, resembled her feelings at that moment. If I was pointing a camera at Jeanne rubbing herself on a machine, I would not be representing her feelings.”

If it were a creepy, non-photogenic dude masturbating in public, rather than a glamorous, award-winning movie star like Merlant, would viewers still be as sympathetic? “It would be a challenge, but why not?” The bigger factor, Wittock believes, is that you emphasise the love story. “The one time you see Noémie rubbing herself and kissing the machine, you’re with her – but the moment you zoom out, and show the scene bare, you’re uncomfortable. I’ve felt this reaction from audiences. It’s uncomfortable with a woman, and it would be uncomfortable if it’s a man.

“People would more instinctively tell a sex fetishist story if it were a man, and more instinctively tell a love story if it were a woman. I think that’s a mistake. Men are just as in love as women. It’s not just about sex, even for men.”

Oddly enough, Merlant shot Jumbo before she was even cast in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. In both, the French actor delivers anguished, simmering looks as she keeps her forbidden romance a secret; when Jeanne feels Jumbo’s armrests strapped around her shoulders, it’s like the cathartic harpsichord-playing scene in Céline Sciamma’s lesbian period-drama. As for whether Jumbo indirectly influenced Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Wittock isn’t sure – or is too polite to say. But she notes, “It shows how much talent Noémie has. It was not because she’s famous that she was cast on Jumbo; it’s because she’s pure talent and the best.”

Of course, dating a rollercoaster has its ups and downs, its twists and turns. It’s an emotional something – if only there were a metaphor for it. But the underlying problem, really, is the overwhelming judgement from outsiders. Like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Jumbo is a queer film about coming out amidst prejudice. Or is that comparison offensive to the LGBTQ+ community?

“What matters is that she feels it, and believes in it. Showing that awakening as a first orgasm, and a more poetic representation of that orgasm, resembled her feelings at that moment” – Zoé Wittock

“I’ve had this conversation with people from the gay community,” Wittock says. “All of them are really behind the film, but some question whether it belongs to that category. I personally think it does, because it carries the same message and fight for open-mindedness, and the acceptance of other people’s differences, and being curious, instead of rejecting that person for their differences. I would personally – but it’s a very personal point of view – associate that community with objectum sexuals.”

Wittock also researched men who own Real Dolls, but concluded it didn’t fit the Venn diagram. “The objectum sexuality community are not looking for humanlike objects,” she explains. “They’re connecting to a soul in an object, but it’s a bridge, it’s the Eiffel Tower, it’s a table. They’re not looking to replace a human relationship. They’re attracted by something else. They feel different types of energy. Whereas I think men within the (Real Doll) community are looking to replace a real-life person with a fake doll, and trying to replicate a normal relationship.”

But isn’t Jeanne, with her choice of machine, replicating something from her childhood? “This is a generality,” Wittock says, making sure she speaks carefully, “but often the commonality (of objectum sexuals) is that they’ve had some kind of trauma in their childhood, whether it’s abandonment, sexual assault, incest or other traumatic experiences, and that diverges their attention to something else. The second thing they oftentimes have in common is some kind of Asperger’s Syndrome, whether it’s really intense and heavy, or, on the contrary, like Erika, where it’s very mild and you wouldn’t know the difference between me and her walking down the street.

“When you close the door to a path in life, so many others open. You realise a path is not right for you, or something blocked it out, whether that’s trauma or not. Because the brain is resilient, the brain will find other ways to be happy and survive. That’s why I feel it’s not compensating; it’s more looking for a way out.”

Since Jumbo premiered at last year’s Sundance, Wittock has signed to CAA and now regularly receives scripts. Some sci-fi, mostly horror. They’re rarely as perverted as she was hoping. “I’d love more stories about taboo things that make people uncomfortable. Different kinds of sexuality. Things that challenge the norm.” During the pandemic, she’s been writing her own screenplays, both in French and English, and noticed a trend in her storytelling instincts. “My desire is not to make people uncomfortable; it’s to make them comfortable with the uncomfortable. Some directors want to be provocative. I don’t want to be provocative; I want to take people’s hand, and push them further than they would normally go.”

I ask if Jumbo will resonate differently because of COVID – at least, for those who see it before cinemas reopen. After all, lockdown has seen a rise in sex toy purchases and long-distance relationships have been kept alive by laptops. Wittock dismisses these comparisons as they’re either purely masturbatory or involve another human. My observation that ASMRtists often roleplay as mechanics fixing lonely robots also doesn’t seem relevant.

“What changes people’s reactions to the film during the pandemic is whether they’re watching it in a theatre,” she says. “It’s just not the same. When trying to convince people a relationship with an inanimate object can actually come to life, you have to push and impress upon their sensory feelings. That’s why you have sound. That’s why you have colour. That’s why you have movement. That’s all stronger in a theatre than in front of a screen.

“It’s not to say the film can’t convince on a computer screen, but it’ll be that much more of an experience if you go to the cinema for a film that’s trying communicate with something other than language.” So see it now, then again when cinemas reopen? “Yes! Exactly! Thank you!”

JUMBO will premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival on February 27 and at the Dublin International Film Festival on March 5 – you can buy tickets to watch it at home now. JUMBO opens in the UK this summer