{ London Film Fest 2011: The Future. }

[delga]

The Future
Director: Miranda July
Writer: Miranda July
Cast: Miranda July, Hamish Linklater, David Warshofsky
Trailer

"I've been gearing up to do something really incredible for the last fifteen years."

The closer I got to this week, the more conscious I was that I needed to finish watching Miranda July's debut feature, You and Me and Everyone We Know which is ostensibly a romantic comedy in which characters pair together in unlikely - and sometimes taboo - couples. I watched the film in full on Tuesday, and abruptly realised why I hadn't finished it the first time around. Whilst I found it funny, I also thought it was wretchedly miserable. July's work is the epitome of unironic quirkiness, and she has a talent for seeing the spaces between two people and filling them with unlikely connections. The film ticks all the boxes for 'offbeat American indie' - candy-coloured palette, dysfunctional characters engaging in offbeat acts, humour sprinkled liberally with swathes of real human sadness. I liked the journeys the characters took, and ultimately everyone gets a happy ending of some sort, but there is endless unresolved wistfulness in this film, and whilst it ends on a hopeful note, I was left with a feeling of great sadness when the credits rolled.

In The Future, a couple in their mid-thirties, Sophie and Jason, are thirty days away from adopting a cat, a decision which propels them into a premature mid-life crisis. They both quit their jobs in an effort to be more open to opportunity and fulfil their own nascent desires. Whilst Jason joins a tree-selling eco-movement, he meets an elderly man whose house is brimming with tokens of his life. There he discovers answers to questions he didn't know he was supposed to be asking. Meanwhile, Sophie fails to make headway on her personal project, 30 Dances in 30 Days, and, in her loneliness, ends up having an affair. And this is the crux of the story: the way in which their relationship is dismantled.

The Future is similar in tone to July's debut effort, her history in performance art bleeding through into her cinematic vision. The film began life as a performance piece, with July pulling a real couple from the audience each night and making them act out the story. When the notion of making it into a movie arose, July had initially planned for it to be something avant-garde, again requiring audience participation, and possibly being shown in a public space rather than a cinema. As a result, the film is at times an exercise in the surreal, narrated by a talking cat, and culminating in an extended sequence where Jason stops time in an effort to prevent Sophie from confessing the affair. Sophie continues with her life, but Jason becomes stuck in that one moment until, with the aid of the moon, he manages to restart time. It's a rather literal take on 'my life stopped when you left me' and yet incredibly tender nonetheless. When Jason explicitly details all of the tiny things that will change now that Sophie is gone, I felt that finally - finally! - we had come to the core of the film.

July spoke about how the film was about reaching that point in your life where you stop looking forward and start to look back, and about capturing how the worst time is when someone you love leaves you. She also talked about what would happen once you decided to leave your life: do you carry on? Or does your core self keep hunting you down? In the film, Sophie is haunted by Shirty, a shirt that she uses in the same way children sometimes use a safety blanket. What helps with all this surrealism is that July and Linklater are very good at combining anxiety with insouciance, and the script is entirely matter-of-fact. There is a complete absence of irony in everything Sophie and Jason say, so whilst the audience may see the irony between their words and their actions, they themselves are incredibly sincere. It's part of what makes the film so funny but it's also what makes it quite sad. This is dramedy the likes of which you've never seen before.