Miranda July's debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know, established her as something of a queen of indie cinema, so what of her latest feature, The Future?
Miranda July really means it. That’s the first thing to grasp about The Future. It would be easy to view The Future’s parade of anxious thirty-somethings, magic realism and talking cats as hipster irony, the cinematic equivalent of John Deere hats and Ray-Ban Wayfarers, but no, writer/director/actor Miranda July really means it.
Which is a thing of beauty, once you tune in to the peculiar tone struck by July’s films. Her characters are precious, yet earnest. Her stories are whimsical yet full of meaning. In The Future, she encapsulates a shedload of modern anxieties with a series of brilliantly communicated vignettes. What you’re left with is an inquisitive, revealing, tragi-comic story about time passing and ambition. Narrated by a talking cat.
The Future is the story of Sophie and Jason, a low-income childless couple in their thirties who have decided to adopt an injured, stray cat. On learning that the cat’s injury means it can’t be taken home for thirty days, Jason and Sophie decide to use their last responsibility-free month to achieve their ambitions and start living the lives they always thought they should live.
For dance teacher Sophie, this means embarking on an ambitious “30 dances, 30 days” project to be recorded on YouTube, for tech-support Jason it means listening to the universe and trying to be aware in every moment. For both of them it means quitting their jobs and finally, doing the unspecified
incredible thing they both feel they’ve been gearing up to for the last fifteen years.
The film’s opening scenes, in which Sophie [Miranda July] and Jason [Hamish Linklater] take stock of their impending future and make plans for the month ahead are comic and very well-observed. Knowing their internet connection is to be switched off in less than an hour, the pair’s desperate scramble to find all the information they need in that time, “Christmas day falls on a Tuesday this year”, is absurd and absolutely recognisable.
When Sophie expresses the deadpan wish that “I’d like to read the news more, but I’m so behind” or comically envies the way an unremarkable neighbour “really has her shit together”, she’s voicing the concerns of a slice of twenty and thirty-somethings who’ve avoided suburbia, careers and kids, telling themselves that they’re pursuing loftier, creative ambitions.
What The Future shows us though, is how paralysing creative ambition can be, and how the idea that you can live life any more intensely by trying to, is a lie. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans, trying to record a 30-day dance project on YouTube, or selling trees door to door, as it turns out.
July’s past as a video artist answers for the film’s composite, meandering style. The Future is built from a string of moments that, taken apart would seem entirely at home as video installations in art galleries: a man has a conversation with the moon; time stops for an entire city; an animated t-shirt crawls across a street; a woman screams out of an open window; a little girl buries herself standing up in her back garden…
The story these moments add up to is uneven, yes, even pace-less at times, but if you let it drift around you, the film’s visual imagination and messages about the goals we set ourselves for the lives we think we should lead, will stay with you.
It’s a wise film, though its wisdom could easily be lost amidst perceptions of its kookiness. July’s decision to adopt the voice of a cat and narrate segments of the film from the perspective of Paw Paw (a cipher for people stuck by continually waiting for what they consider their “real lives” to begin), runs a very thin line between being a cutesy gag and causing audiences to just plain gag.
At the screening I attended, one man left almost immediately that Paw Paw began to utter her Yoda-like pronouncements on life outside and being “cat which is belonging to you”. Who knows, though, he may just have left the oven on.
Some will no doubt find the film a skin-crawlingly posturing exercise in preciousness. Luckily, for those people, films like The Future don’t come around all that often and are very easy to avoid when they do.
More’s the pity, because, and I’ll admit it took a couple of weeks of reflection to arrive it this conclusion, The Future’s one of the most perceptive and imaginative films I’ve seen in a long while. Seek it out.
Which is a thing of beauty, once you tune in to the peculiar tone struck by July’s films. Her characters are precious, yet earnest. Her stories are whimsical yet full of meaning. In The Future, she encapsulates a shedload of modern anxieties with a series of brilliantly communicated vignettes. What you’re left with is an inquisitive, revealing, tragi-comic story about time passing and ambition. Narrated by a talking cat.
The Future is the story of Sophie and Jason, a low-income childless couple in their thirties who have decided to adopt an injured, stray cat. On learning that the cat’s injury means it can’t be taken home for thirty days, Jason and Sophie decide to use their last responsibility-free month to achieve their ambitions and start living the lives they always thought they should live.
For dance teacher Sophie, this means embarking on an ambitious “30 dances, 30 days” project to be recorded on YouTube, for tech-support Jason it means listening to the universe and trying to be aware in every moment. For both of them it means quitting their jobs and finally, doing the unspecified
incredible thing they both feel they’ve been gearing up to for the last fifteen years.
The film’s opening scenes, in which Sophie [Miranda July] and Jason [Hamish Linklater] take stock of their impending future and make plans for the month ahead are comic and very well-observed. Knowing their internet connection is to be switched off in less than an hour, the pair’s desperate scramble to find all the information they need in that time, “Christmas day falls on a Tuesday this year”, is absurd and absolutely recognisable.
When Sophie expresses the deadpan wish that “I’d like to read the news more, but I’m so behind” or comically envies the way an unremarkable neighbour “really has her shit together”, she’s voicing the concerns of a slice of twenty and thirty-somethings who’ve avoided suburbia, careers and kids, telling themselves that they’re pursuing loftier, creative ambitions.
What The Future shows us though, is how paralysing creative ambition can be, and how the idea that you can live life any more intensely by trying to, is a lie. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans, trying to record a 30-day dance project on YouTube, or selling trees door to door, as it turns out.
July’s past as a video artist answers for the film’s composite, meandering style. The Future is built from a string of moments that, taken apart would seem entirely at home as video installations in art galleries: a man has a conversation with the moon; time stops for an entire city; an animated t-shirt crawls across a street; a woman screams out of an open window; a little girl buries herself standing up in her back garden…
The story these moments add up to is uneven, yes, even pace-less at times, but if you let it drift around you, the film’s visual imagination and messages about the goals we set ourselves for the lives we think we should lead, will stay with you.
It’s a wise film, though its wisdom could easily be lost amidst perceptions of its kookiness. July’s decision to adopt the voice of a cat and narrate segments of the film from the perspective of Paw Paw (a cipher for people stuck by continually waiting for what they consider their “real lives” to begin), runs a very thin line between being a cutesy gag and causing audiences to just plain gag.
At the screening I attended, one man left almost immediately that Paw Paw began to utter her Yoda-like pronouncements on life outside and being “cat which is belonging to you”. Who knows, though, he may just have left the oven on.
Some will no doubt find the film a skin-crawlingly posturing exercise in preciousness. Luckily, for those people, films like The Future don’t come around all that often and are very easy to avoid when they do.
More’s the pity, because, and I’ll admit it took a couple of weeks of reflection to arrive it this conclusion, The Future’s one of the most perceptive and imaginative films I’ve seen in a long while. Seek it out.
