|
The Future
| Released |
4 November 2011 |
| Director |
Miranda July |
Starring
|
Miranda July, Hamish Linklater, David Warshofsky |
| Writer(s) |
Miranda July |
Producer(s)
|
Gina Kwon, Roman Paul, Gerhard Meixner |
| Origin |
Germany, United States |
| Running Time |
91 minutes |
| Genre |
Drama |
| Rating |
15A |
|
|
is always beginning now.
More than anything else The Future left me running back to rewatch Miranda July's earlier arthouse effort Me and You and Everyone We Know to see if it was quite as odd. It wasn't. Not in the same way at least. Me and You and Everyone We Know was a triptych tale that wove together narrative strands in a familiar albeit consciously quirky form. The Future still has the mark of a Miranda July film but is altogether a stranger and far more insular tale. Where the locus of oddity in Me and You and Everyone We Know often focused on character moments here it is let loose across the whole essence of the film, leaving the audience grappling with chronal changes, a feline narrator caught just out of frame and a case of confusing almost Lynchian magical realism.
Centring on the demise of a couple who in their mid thirties feel their lives are slipping past, The Future begins when Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) decide to adopt a cat. Paw Paw, narrator of the story, is an old ailing cat with a cast on his leg that the couple are initially informed will only live for six months. In actuality, they must first wait one month for Paw Paw's cast to be removed after which the veterinarian says given the right care and attention he could live up to five years. This is news which sends the couple into a spiral of discontent with a future they see as almost over and a past full of regret.
Visually, The Future is often subtly stunning, July, being a director who is clearly as interested in innovation and artistry as telling a story, has made a film that at times looks startlingly like a Gregory Crewdson photograph. Characters wander bereft onto the suburban sidewalks at break of day, children mysteriously bury themselves in back gardens and people sit on bedsides occupying strange sorrowful poses in light flooded bedrooms. The poignant suggestion that something startling could or is about to occur pervades the entirety of July's film and we watch entranced as the two thirty-something suburbanites waft like somnambulists through these seductively strange set pieces.
Using a method less like metaphor and more akin to pataphor when the metaphorical constructs wrest free from the original narrative and begin making contexts of their own, July's film, at times, is truly a pleasure but at others doesn't really hang together asking its audience to turn its twee dial to eleven and imbibe more whimsy than many might handle. However, as Sophie and Jason struggle for meaning, with as many falsely epiphanous moments as real, she captures something distinctively true about life and the subjective experience of time.
The Future while not visionary is an enjoyably anomalous journey by a very unique voice.
- Cormac O’Brien |
