I have seen The Future, Miranda July’s second film as writer/director/star…and it begins with a talking cat. Well, a narrating cat. (July is married to Mike Mills, whose concurrently released Beginners features a dog whose thoughts are subtitles. Kismet, I guess.) The cat, never quite seen, narrates in a voice—July’s mousy voice, but imitating the scratchy, child-like voice you would give to a stuffed animal—that one is bound to find adorable or, more likely, be really irritated by. The cat isn’t in the movie enough to make or break the film, but its presence is some guide to July’s sensibility.
Or, try this: First scene (after the cat), July and her costar, Hamish Linklater, playing a couple with their laptops on a couch. Not wishing to get up to get herself a drink or water, she wishes she had a crane to reach the sink. He points out that she’d need to turn on the water. She replies that she could do that with her mind, and he says it’s a shame her only power is something one could do with one’s hand in any case. His power, he tells her, is to be able to stop time. And he does. Or pretends to. So it’s that kind of movie, whatever that is. Not really comical, but playful, or precious if you prefer, the sort of movie you’d expect a performance artist, which July was, to make. The stopping-time bit shows up later.
The plot, such as there is, revolves around the couple’s realization that they are 35, the age in which one’s life becomes set, particularly if you’ve agreed to adopt a cat, which they have, in a month. (This makes slightly more sense in the context of the movie, but I think it is true that 35 is an age in which most people realize that they have more or less taken whatever path they were going to take in life.) So, with a month to go, they set out to change course, and that goes about as well as it does for most people, although each of them makes a new friend. The need to connect is a definite theme.
July’s other film was called Me and You and Everyone We Know, of which I only remember that it was also teetering between quirky and precious and original, and July played another character somewhere in the space between odd-but-believable and too-weird-even-for-Los Angeles. Also, the person I saw it with hated it. I think this may also be a love-or-hate-it affair. I know this because I was right on the fence, as I tend to be with that kind of thing. I liked several scenes, including the quasi-magical realist stuff, although I think The Science of Sleep, to which I can very roughly compare this, did it better. If done right, a film can be quirky in a way that leads to a lot of feeling. This approaches that place, but kind of blows it with an ending that seemed slight to me.
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/18/11
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