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There is an interactive performance piece on Miranda July's self-titled website, where we are shown picture after picture after picture of children and young adults in various states of metaphysical torment. What is there torment? They all have somebody they love, but for various reasons (seperation, parental divorce, even death) they can no longer see them. As they all hold pictures of their respective lost loves, it is loneliness that we feel. It is this pervailing, sometimes overwhelming, sense of loneliness that pervades every inch of Performance Artist/Musician/Writer/Human Being, Miranda July's directorial debut, Me and You and Everyone We Know. A sense of loneliness that nearly everyone has experienced at some point in their lives.
July manages to show this loneliness through her characters - and through her characters' actions - without ever having to stoop to any kind of oversentimental cliche - or ever once pandering to her audience. Although, there are times when one thinks it might become overbearingly sweet-toothed, July manages to keep on track, at least far better than most first time Directors would. She creates moments that try (some better than others) to swerve away from any by-pruduct of Filmmaking 101. There is one such moment - early in the film - where struggling artist Christine, played with perfect pitch by July herself, working as an elder cab driver, is in the car with one of her elderly clients, when they spy a newly bought goldfish, in its tiny half water filled plastic baggie, mistakenly left atop the roof of a highway travelling minivan. The scene that ensues is sadly tender without ever going over the edge into the realm of schmaltz. This goldfish scene pretty much sums up the film's main antagonism, that no matter what happens, people must accept you the way you are, and nothing you do will change that - no matter if you are rescued by a neighboring car, or left in a puddly grave upon the uncaring highway.
What July has sculpted is a film full of lonely people searching for meaning in their lives. Christine wants recognition. Richard (John Hawkes from TV's Deadwood) wants happiness. Peter & Robby, Richard's children, want their family whole again. Neighbour-girl Sylvie wants to be an older married woman. Heather & Rebecca, two teenage friends, want to understand life. Richard's work mate, Andrew, wants somebody to hold at night. They all want love - of one sort or another. July has seeped these various characters out throughout the film as if they were all different versions of the same person - which in a way they are. They are all July. They are all you. They are all me. They are everyone. July, with her crystal blue eyes and sulking sexy voice, puts the entirity of life into her film, even if that life may not amount to anything very substantial in the end - and that is not meant as an insult, really, but more of a desire for something greater than what is hidden inside the dark recesses of these characters' minds.
Besides the loneliness, which I have talked of almost exclusively so far, there is one other pervailing wind blowing about July's film - that wind is the blowing of sex. Whether it is an older man, full of bruvara, coming on to two sixteen year old girls or those same girls performing methodical fellatio upon Peter, so as to deduce which one would be better at it or a cyberspace mix-up involving an older woman and a six year old Robby, where they frankly talk of Coprophiliac desires. Never is the sex talk, almost exclusively the product of the younger characters in the film, shown as anything but children trying to understand what their bodies mean. It is not meant to arouse. It is not meant to pander to any PC mindset. It is not meant to be tossed off as a silly joke. It is spoken of in such a matter-of-fact way, that even though it is at times hilarious, it is more heartbreaking than anything - the loneliness is still there.
A somewhat cautiously sublime directorial debut from Miranda July - Me and You and Everyone We Know, is a good film. I make sure to state that fact, because the more I thought about this film, the more I tended to not like it all that much. Tantilizing on the surface, rather tepid deep down, but still an enjoyably malaisical debut, and although discernibly versed with an artist's touch, the film will probably fall through the cracks of American Cinema, instead of becoming the Sideways of 2005 (a discriptive I have heard on several occasions), but hopefully I am wrong about that - even with the tiresome impatience I have grown for the film. July's next film? She says it will be full of stars, but we know that is a glorious lie from a woman whose life is one gigantic performance piece.
- August 9, 2005
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