by Ryan Macdonald

Hoping to keep the laughs rolling Saturday, I headed back to Pacific Place Cinema to catch Miranda July’s latest, The Future.

Even though I loved July’s first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, I never thought many people had seen it, or knew who she was. So when I got to the theater and saw a line of 200+ people wrapping around the mall, I was blown away. It’s always nice to see talented indie directors get some major love.

The Future is definitely more layered than Me and You…. It’s about Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), a mid-thirties couple stuck in professional and emotional ruts. They rescue a stray cat (also the narrator of the film), whose veterinary diagnosis isn’t good. The doc gives it a few months (“possibly a few years, if it bonds with you”). They’re going to keep it for a month, though, and put it through some treatments. So the couple marks the day on their calendar and begins contemplating time, life, and things left undone. Jason sums it up in one of my favorite lines: “In five years, we’ll be forty. Forty is basically fifty. After that, it’s all just spare change. Not enough to get anything you really want.” They come up with a plan. For that month, they’re going to really cut loose. Do things they’ve always wanted to do. Be spontaneous. Live. They start by quitting their jobs.

This simple premise ultimately develops into a film that’s anything but. Jason spontaneously gets a job with an environmental group selling trees door to door. Since Sophie was a dance teacher, she says she’s going to come up with a new dance every day for 30 days. What starts off light and whimsical quickly devolves, however, and the characters begin learning things about themselves and about life that they didn’t expect. Through basic storytelling, believable characters, and a fun yet contemplative flirtation with surrealism, Miranda July shows us that often times, the little voice inside us begging to be let out of the cage and yearning to run free is the same voice that wants to be let back in when the nights get cold.

As I said, I loved Me and You and Everyone We Know. I loved it, but can definitely understand people’s aversion to it. It’s…quirky…to say the least. With The Future, I can see a definite and commendable maturation in Miranda July, both as an actress and as a writer/director. What came across as pretentious to others in her first film struck me as merely an affectation. With her second film, she’s graduated to esoteric non sequitors and an almost kitchen sink, David Lynch-meets-mumblecore style of storytelling. Half the fun of watching her films or reading her stories is that you shouldn’t try to understand and interpret everything. In a way, wanting to analyze the significance of, say, the yellow T-shirt that follows Sophie around in act two, actually ruins its significance. This is a very personal film that was obviously written specifically for July and Linklater. What I mean by that is the dialog, the emotions here, are not naturalistic. I don’t know anyone who talks or acts like these people do. If anyone else had played these characters, the writing wouldn’t have worked. But somehow, someway, these two actors playing these specific roles in this particular film was perfect. I completely believed that, should you happen to meet Miranda or Hamish or Sophie or Jason on the street, they would actually be those people.

The choice to have the cat narrate really doesn’t make sense until the very end of the film. It doesn’t necessarily clash with the rest of the story, it just comes across as a completely random choice until act three, when it almost becomes the most important part of the film. The way these narration scenes from a newspaper-lined cage are shown is highly amusing.

My only gripe with the film, and perhaps it was intentional, is that these characters seem to exist in a haze of flat affect and gray zone emotions. I definitely understand the audience being left out of certain conversations. I can see how each character’s confusion with and efforts to understand life could come across as vague. But for some reason I had a very hard time understanding the motivations for a lot of their actions. Granted, I’ve just been praising the film’s realism, and we’ve all done things without knowing why. But in a movie, sometimes it can be frustrating to watch a character go from point A to point C without even acknowledging point B.

I don’t want to explain this film. I don’t want to overanalyze it or throw out spoilers. This is a personally crafted film, and as such should be a personally consumed and processed film. Infidelity, stopping time, finding a direct connection to your future, and especially trapping love in a cage. These are the parts of July’s own psyche that she exposes us to. But as with her first film, in showing us these parts of herself. These personal, nonsensical, off the wall parts of herself. She’s showing us a very honest, relatable and unnervingly accurate caricature of ourselves. Very often I leave a film feeling like I know the filmmaker a little better. But honestly, and yes, nonsensically, after leaving The Future I felt like Miranda July knew me a little better. I highly recommend this film to anyone who enjoys good independent film, great character stories, or just a great collection of “what the fuck?” moments.

Final Grade: B+

Q & A

Gracing us with an introduction to the film and a Q & A afterwards, Miranda July became my favorite person at this festival. From her initial story about only being able to get an egg, a breadless tuna sandwich, and a peanut butter smoothie late at night in deserted downtown Seattle, to her personable, relaxed explanations of her film, July is exactly who I expected her to be in person. It was very interesting hearing about what parts of the film were her creations, and which parts were completely naturalistic. She was very candid about her personal touches, and her intentions with the film. Afterwards, at the New American Cinema party (hosted by Il Fornaio), July was very warm and accommodating as she chatted with film goers over drinks and h’ors d’ourves. My thanks to Miss July, SIFF, and Il Fornaio for making it worth the wait in line.

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