Written/Directed By: Miranda July
Starring: Miranda July as Sophie, Hamish Linklater as Jason, David Warshofsky as Marshall
Me and You and Everyone We Know, July’s debut feature-length film, is a fearlessly original take on the indie drama. A pre-pubescent boy with an odd view of sex (“I want to poop back and forth. Forever.”), a man who sets his hand on fire to entertain his two indifferent children and a performance artist who goes to extreme measures to pursue a stranger she is convinced is her soulmate are just a few of the characters that populate her wildly idiosyncratic world. In her new film The Future, the characters too are incredibly strange. I mean, in the first half of the film, Sophie spends most of her screentime watching amateur dancers on YouTube and attempting to choreograph a genuinely atrocious-looking dance of her own. She also has a magical pet T-shirt (yes, literally, like, a yellow T-shirt named “Shirty”). Her husband, Jason, on the other hand, stops time, talks to the moon and discovers life-changing revelations in meaningless everyday encounters.
But for all its strangeness, The Future, like Me and You and Everyone We Know before it, is relatable, truthful, humane. Sophie loves Jason, but his meekness and gentleness has left her with a fuckton of pent-up sexual frustration, which she recklessly channels into an affair predicated on her desire to feel needed and wanted. She knows that there really isn’t anything wrong about her marriage, but she can’t help but accuse her husband of not wanting her the way she would like. Jason loves his wife and their “boring” life together, and accepts all of her idiosyncrasies, but so badly wishes for something extraordinary to happen that he is perpetually suspended in his own extraordinary imagination. Above all, this is a film about a couple who really do love each other (or at least, I would like to think so), but who are struggling to discover what they want in life — and don’t really know where to start but from each other.
What I find incredibly alluring about July’s films is how the supporting characters form a network of symbols and metaphors that reveals an added dimension to the psychology of the protagonists. Marshall’s daughter and Paw-Paw are Sophie’s doppelgangers of sorts; the former wades into the ‘wild’ (ironically, despite Sophie’s protests) and rediscovers the warmth of ‘tame’ shelter, while the latter dies waiting for someone else to rescue her from the cold, long nights (a metaphor for Sophie’s fear of being alone and of not being wanted). The yellow pet T-shirt acts as a reminder of Sophie’s real identity — the one unburdened and unconfused by her fears — and symbolically envelops Sophie in a painfully awkward moment of self-awakening. The old man represents Jason’s superego and guide to self-awakening, thus convinces Jason that the uncertainty and frustration he feels is merely temporary. What is wonderful too is how these characters have wonderful bursts of dialogue that are both delightful in their over-the-top dramaticism and poetic in their spot-on propheticism. In Me and You and Everyone We Know, there is this particularly awesome sequence where Peter Swersey and Sylvie are lying down on the floor in Sylvie’s room, staring up at the ceiling, and the dialogue goes something like:
Peter: I’d live up there, if I could. If there wasn’t gravity.
Sylvie: Yeah…But if you lived up there, then all this stuff, all this stuff in my room, will fall on you and crush you. And you’d die.
In The Future, there are too many moments (though not really as quotable) where the supporting characters suddenly and unexpectedly spit out lines that tear at the very core of central emotional tensions. However, what makes the dialogue in The Future rather different from Me and You and Everyone We Know is its occasional, startling, self-reflective candidness. The most heartbreaking scene in the film, I think, is when Jason freezes time at 3.14am because he is frightened of life without Sophie:
Jason: I move my hand and she’s fucking him. I know exactly what’s going to happen at 3.15. At 3.15, we aren’t going to get back in bed together. And she isn’t going to wrap her legs around my legs. And we aren’t gonna fall asleep. And then in the morning she isn’t gonna say “Hi, person” and then we aren’t gonna have another day, just an ordinary, boring day, and then we aren’t gonna have any kids, and then we aren’t gonna grow old together. And we aren’t gonna look back at our lives, because we wouldn’t even know each other. That’s what’s going to happen at 3.15.
Moments like these make the occasional impenetrability suddenly profound and meaningful. Often, life is impenetrable too, but for every nonsensical whirlwind of shit, there’s something worth celebrating and loving and looking forward to; and that’s the beauty that July really seeks to extol here.
The only major objection I have with this film is the ‘cat’ voice-overs, which I’m assuming — in its similarity to the performance art pieces featured in Me and You and Everyone We Know — is one of the performance pieces that inspired the film. The inclusion feels awkward, out of place, pretentious and unnecessary. For something that features so prominently and that takes up so much screentime, it never adds anything to the film. I understand that Paw-Paw is supposed to be a metaphor for Sophie’s ‘wild’ side waiting to be tamed, but the opening ‘cat’ sequence alone already provides adequate explanation. The film succeeds on so many levels because of its unpredictability, its over-the-top poeticism and its lovable whimsicality. The ‘cat’ scenes, however, are aimless, obvious and often, quite tiresome. There is a very fine line between genius and preciosity, and this is a rare instance where July unwittingly finds herself on the wrong side of the threshold. Still, this film is too fearless for one to be bogged down by the occasional missteps.
Ultimately, this is a major artistic leap forward for July, who completely embraces the more idiosyncratic elements of her debut and produces a magical thing that is occasionally an impenetrable mindfuck, occasionally an abstract philosophical/existential meditation, but also that is always triumphant, always gorgeous, and always resolutely original. It’s definitely not for everyone, and its in-your-face eccentricity can easily (unfortunately) be dismissed as kitsch, but if you love avant-garde arthouse films, you’ll definitely love this.
KevinScale Rating: 4.5/5
therein, Therin. 