The Future(2011)
Directed By Miranda July
Directed By Miranda July
Miranda July has a very singular cinematic style that most people dismiss away as twee or cloying, which to me is a very superficial dismissal, because it gets no deeper than her characters softly eccentric clothing and homemade art projects, and ignores the complex webs of relationships she created in "Me, And You, And Everyone We Know" which continues in her latest film "The Future", but now includes characters that aren't human, and events impossible. 
The Future is about a couple in their mid-thirties, Sophie (Miranda July) is a children's dance instructor, while Jason (Hamish Linklater) has a job in tech-support that he can do from home on the couch. 
The two live happily, if uneventfully, in their own world of private jokes, musings, and intimate tangents, the kind that all couples have but that like excessive public displays of affection are rarely observed by those in the outside world. 
They have decided to adopt a kitten, but a sick one that is scheduled to die in six months, so that it will be not so much a commitment as a few months of charity, and maybe also maybe a dry run to having children. The "c" word never comes up directly, but its visible in nervous glances they exchange when they discover the cat could live another four years. "We'll be forty by then". 
The kitten in question, named Paw Paw, also serves as a narrator, but one whose perspective is completely limited to his cage, and his imaginings of what life will be like once he is adopted by July and Linklater. 
Paw Paw is unfailing, undying hope for the future incarnate. He's always been an outside cat, the world of inside sounds like a paradise. So too, do July and Linklater proceed from their cage like apartment to map out their own futures. 
July convinces Linklater, they are getting older and must seize the day! Seizing the day requires them to quite their jobs, vow to be "sincere" with everyone and in all things, to limit Internet access to one hour a day, and follow their dreams. But what are their dreams? 
What one of July's points here seems to be is that people often decide to follow their dreams, before they even know what their dreams are. No one is allowed to exist in the present, unless it is in service to the future. Maybe it's better to just sleep soundly next to your loved one than bother with dreams. "It's a widely known fact that dreams are just your brains way of taking a dump at the end of the day."-Stella, "Kaboom" 
One great scene finds July watching two of her friends, whose lives seem to pass by in seconds, until she's standing in front of their grandchildren. Notice all the trophies on one side in the screen-shot below from said scene. 
Linklater isn't sure what his dreams are, he wants to "help the world" but doesn't know how or where to begin. He takes a job with a "non-profit" going door to door trying to get people to buy trees to be planted throughout the city.
July tries to do a video-project for YouTube called "30 days, 30 dances", inspired by videos of younger girls dancing in their bedrooms imitating girls from rap videos. 
Her dances are not as overtly sexual, but slinky, jerky performance art that never seems to get itself started. 
Linklater's sincerity or guilt for not feeling "more" leads him to buy a drawing on sale at the animal shelter. July's renewed sense of destiny and the significance of everything leads her in a moment of self-doubt, to impulsively to get into contact with the artist, a man named Marshall. 
This "yes to everything" attitude, quickly leads to an affair. 
He puts his hand on her leg, she humps his furniture. 
Marshall is an older suburban single dad and owner of his own company. Though we never learn too much of his perspective its obvious she is a shot life to him, while he is her chance to be a "kept woman", free of having to decide anything more about the future. Finally a chance, to just "be" and let someone else foot the bill for once. 
No more worries about rent, career, talent, beauty, or the entropy of such things. "I wish I was prettier. I'm on the verge of being attractive, but I still have to make my case to everyone who looks at me.", July says of herself early on.
"Your free now" Marshall tells her during a "Welcome" barbeque as he gestures her in the direction of his daughter. 
Meanwhile when Linklater discovers the affair, before he can ask any questions, he manifests an ability to freeze time by placing his hands on July's head. 
Here the narrative splits in two parallel stories, one of July's new life in the suburbs, and the other of Linklater's in the apartment where time stands still. 
Linklater begins talking to the moon, which speaks back to him in the voice of an old man that he meet earlier; a man he believed was a sign of he and July's future of growing old together. July's new suburban life is just as dull as her old life, but with no chance of failure or responsibility hanging over her.
An old t-shirt of Linklater's seems to be edging its way across town of its own accord, like a creeping memory of the world she left behind.
At the same time Marshall's daughter begins to ominously dig a a hole in the backyard, but she wont say for what or why?
This all sounds complicated, but when all is said and done, the plot makes sense on an emotional level that never gets buried under the allure of its fantasy elements. 
"The Future" finds Miranda July stepping into interstitial territory previously synonymous with Woody Allen and Charlie Kaufman; combing personal details ("30 Dances, 30 Days" is a more amateurish version of July's Blond Redhead music video), with a satirical eye for conventional relationships equally open to turns of the dramatic, the neurotic, the deadpan, and the poetic. 
Quitting your job in the worst recession in decades because your a month away from getting a sick kitten that has made you suddenly aware of your impending adulthood/responsibility/death is just as possible as freezing time with your thoughts, talking to the moon, or stepping out of your life and into your fantasy kept suburban wifedom, because in "The Future" all things are possible. 
Cats are dreaming of life in your house, but the future is less fresh tuna and flying cars as much recordings of bedroom rump-shaking and trees pining over places to be planted. Maybe its the looming of the future itself, its shadow across the surface of what responsible lives are supposed to resemble that drives these characters from their simple "twee" world of uni-sex haircuts, security blankets and sleepy, snuggly, afternoons, and into ruin, bitterness, and isolation. "When your just starting out...you'll do terrible things to each other"-the old man. 
But ignoring the future, is no better than blindly saying "yes" to all it, because all decisions have consequences and time can't stand still forever. 
What begins with all the makings of a typical rom-com story of slackers finding purpose, sidewinds into magic realist study of fears of parenthood/adulthood like "Eraserhead" if he had to work at a build-a-bear in the mall. 
For all its strangeness, "The Future" has the most realistic endings of any film Ive seen this year. Bitter-sweet is beauty without sentiment, true acceptance of how cosmically wonderous all the minutia of daily life is while never forgetting most of it will be forgotten tomorrow. "The Future" is bittersweet. 
Your kittens is wounded and waiting. 
Directed By Miranda July
Ive heard mixed reviews of Miranda July's fiction, but there is no denying her prowess as a film maker. 
This romantic comedy and ensemble piece, is one of those unexpectedly funny, moving, awkward, human, and complex indie films that comes around once every years, and gets imitated to death ever after. 
Fortunately "Me And You And Everyone We Know" has not begun to loose it's freshness just yet. 
July, uses her characters as vessels for musings on love, death, technology, sexuality, and loneliness. 
None of the characters in the story are one dimensional, everyone is entangled, and everyone is leading lives of quiet desperation. 
Through chance encounters, diverse yet familiar characters are brought together. In some of the, indeed, most adorable, and at times extremely discomforting scenes your likely to see(if your touchy about children and sexuality you might want to steer clear), but all are treated with the same sense of honesty that keeps the film from feeling cheap or melodramatic.
A man in the midst of a divorce sets his hand on fire, a failed "magic trick" he meant to delight his children with. 
Two girls are propositioned by a series of sexual signs posted by this man's co-worker, spurning on a sudden sexual awakening/curiosity. 
Meanwhile the man's sons are courting sex talk in online chat rooms, "pretending to be men". 
Their next door neighbor collects furniture and appliances for the dowry she will one day give her husband, so that her family will already be fully equipped when she is ready to tie the knot, and take(at least to her naivete) her own step into women hood. 
July herself plays a performance artist, who runs a cab service for the elderly, and she has a growing infatuation with the father who burnt his hand in the magic act.
Richard Swersey: "I don't want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. I can handle it."
Me And You is a movie about the things which hold us together in the modern world, and those things which keep us apart, childhood mysteries, and adult magic. 
Despite it's veneer of incessant quirkiness, it shows adolescent sexuality as it is, a matter of pretense, performance, and awkwardness.
For one it's got a teen three way doesn't appear like Larry Clark dark cautionary self-flagellation. 
Young people do really have moments of sexual experimentation, but there's very little market for non-Porky's /American Pie or Kids style examinations of teen sexuality, so that all depictions between those two extremes vanish. 
The uneasy, but natural grace with which July transitions between these moments of clearly trying to out quirk/impress each other and the audience ("this walk down the street will be like our whole lives" and "Cody ChestnuTT is our favorite cd." ), she is able to connect with genuine feelings. 
A teen boy is the meat in an older teen girl three-way and becomes introverted, seeking out the company of younger neighbor and simpler more a-sexual times. 
The girls able to feel in control of their bodies with the boy, still falter before the threshold of giving in to all the signs and suggestions, that they should be older than they are, and "chicken out" in a scene that makes running in slow mo and smiling(a big no-no-no- for me in rom-com and dramadies) not nauseating.
Ive heard criticisms of the film like "the art curator has an ironic mug...how tired, how hipster, etc", this is true she does have such a mug, but she has the mug as part of a greater gag involving an art exhibit that has become so nebulous she can't tell were the studio the artist works in and his work itself begin. In fact she insists he stole the mug. 
July's adult and elderly characters, aren't as mystified by sex itself, but struggle to maintain family relationships in the face of love's end and to maintain love itself at the end of life, as the seniors July cab's around do. 
The fact that by the end of the movie we are shown the Internet itself, as a bridge between the isolation of adulthood and the blind curiosity of children is not just a wonderfully pleasant and subversive way in our age of "To Catch A Predator"(a favorite program of mine), to show how technology has changed our lives, but also how the gap and divide between our-selves (who you are now to who you were way back then), is not as great we repeatedly tell ourselves, and all without resorting to a "13 going on 30"/"17 Again" fantasy.
It's a romantic comedy, that doesn't feel in any way cliche (a very rare thing). Like Limits Of Control is uses modern style and aesthetics to touch on complex and genuine ideas and emotions, using a genre film frame. 
When I went to see it in a theater there were two old ladies sitting in front of me and one said to the other "what's this about" and the other said "I think it's about an interacial family dealing with race relations."
I remember sitting there and thinking "shit did I just pay for this." and then being thoughrouly pleased that it fell into no such trap.
Me And You given time to simmer and settle, is as good as "Punch Drunk Love", "High Fidelity","Before Sunsirse", "Welcome To The Dollhouse", "The Lovers On The Bridge" and all those literate hip rom-coms and dramedies whove have come before. 
Anyway Ive come to have allot of affection for it, its an easy film to love, which I know repulses some people right out, but it's a smart, funny and sensitive American independent film, in a time when countless other hollow "indie's" court "sleeper hit" cross-over success.
Miranda July may have a short lived career in the literary world, but . 
