Sophie and Jason, a low-key couple with matching curly mops of hair, have agreed to adopt a wounded cat that they found. The cat must first stay at a shelter for some medical care, and will be ready to come home with them in thirty days. It may not live long. But if they take good care of it, the cat could hang on another five or six years. In five or six years, they will be forty years old. Forty is practically fifty, and the years after fifty, Jason notes, are "loose change" -- odd amounts that don't add up to much. After those thirty days, Sophie and Jason conclude, their life will be well on its way to being more or less over.
If you nodded in recognition at this peculiar yet not entirely illogical form of rounding up, you will probably enjoy The Future, the new film from author and performance artist Miranda July, who directs, writes, and stars as Sophie. Sophie and Jason (Hamish Linklater) use the thirty-day deadline as an impetus to recalibrate their lives; they quit functional but dead-end jobs, they resolve to create, and be open, and live up to the potential they've always assumed they have. Sophie, a dance instructor, tries to post a new dance every day for a month on YouTube, with little success ("But I've already emailed everyone," she says plaintively, after failing to kickstart her project on Day One).
Jason, with less specific and attention-dependent goals, gets a job with environmental solicitors and meets Joe (Joe Putterlik), an old man with a mysterious possible connection to the couple's current life. Sophie, too, is drawn to an older man: she encounters Marshall (David Warshofsky) by chance and forms an unexpected bond with him, tentative and half-creepy, at his suburban home. Jason jokes about, and then kind of actually attempts, stopping time. Both characters regard, warily, ideas about domestication, and how they might use it to their advantage.
This is July's second feature; her first, the lovely Me and You and Everything We Know, had the luxury of an interconnected ensemble of characters. The Future, shot in a more muted color palette and often indoors, is at once smaller and more vast. It stays focused on Sophie and Jason, yet their quiet and mildly self-obsessed universe contains multitudes of fear, frustration, and mortality. It also has a talking cat.
Yes, the cat waiting patiently for its new owners talks, at least to the audience. It's voiceover, but not exactly narration; the cat (whose scraggly, high-pitched voice is provided by July) talks about his life in the wild, his life at the animal shelter, and his anticipation of the impending adoption, among other things. Even if, above, you nodded in recognition at Sophie and Jason's mental compression of the years between thirty-five and death, you may have, after this talk of cat voiceover and stopping time, dismissed The Future as cutesy.
It's not an accusation July can likely avoid unless she radically changes her work to fit the standards of indie austerity (quirkiness is a weakness! Regionally specific poor people are king!), yet it's not particularly accurate, either. With cat voices and YouTube videos as plot points, The Future does sound like bait for an imaginary and deeply stereotypical hipster audience (I'm not sure if there's another kind of hipster audience, since it's a qualifier that almost no one would use to self-identify). But it avoids meme-happy cat-lady territory because of July's skill at capturing the sadness and depth of feeling available all around us in every day life -- and doing so with her sense of humor intact. The characters may be self-conscious; the filmmaker herself comes off more self-aware.
Though it's similarly funny and affecting, The Future is a good deal stranger than Me and You and Everyone We Know, and more closely resembles July's short fiction in its use of fantastical or surreal elements; in this way, and given her attention to the characters' ticking clocks, it recalls Charlie Kaufman's obtuse, sometimes brilliant Synecdoche, New York. A few threads of July's film, like the little girl who wants to be sleep buried up to her neck in dirt, feel like sketches for past or future short stories, and aren't given attention enough to pay off, as if she can't fully let go of ensemble mode even with a minimum of characters onscreen. Maybe it's a self-consciousness of a different sort: as an actress, July's range of expression is relatively limited; happy, sad, frustrated, or confused, she tends to react with the same even-keeled tentativeness, so perhaps she relies on others for contrast.
But July is also an empathetic presence, even as Sophie shows a lot of weakness, and her film has more moments of grace, beauty, and hilarity than its occasional question marks. Even at its most willfully bizarre, The Future has a sincere ache at its core, filled with anxiety about growing old and living a meaningful life. I don't think this is cutesy, or even cute. It is sad, it is funny, and it feels true.
If you nodded in recognition at this peculiar yet not entirely illogical form of rounding up, you will probably enjoy The Future, the new film from author and performance artist Miranda July, who directs, writes, and stars as Sophie. Sophie and Jason (Hamish Linklater) use the thirty-day deadline as an impetus to recalibrate their lives; they quit functional but dead-end jobs, they resolve to create, and be open, and live up to the potential they've always assumed they have. Sophie, a dance instructor, tries to post a new dance every day for a month on YouTube, with little success ("But I've already emailed everyone," she says plaintively, after failing to kickstart her project on Day One).
Jason, with less specific and attention-dependent goals, gets a job with environmental solicitors and meets Joe (Joe Putterlik), an old man with a mysterious possible connection to the couple's current life. Sophie, too, is drawn to an older man: she encounters Marshall (David Warshofsky) by chance and forms an unexpected bond with him, tentative and half-creepy, at his suburban home. Jason jokes about, and then kind of actually attempts, stopping time. Both characters regard, warily, ideas about domestication, and how they might use it to their advantage.
This is July's second feature; her first, the lovely Me and You and Everything We Know, had the luxury of an interconnected ensemble of characters. The Future, shot in a more muted color palette and often indoors, is at once smaller and more vast. It stays focused on Sophie and Jason, yet their quiet and mildly self-obsessed universe contains multitudes of fear, frustration, and mortality. It also has a talking cat.
Yes, the cat waiting patiently for its new owners talks, at least to the audience. It's voiceover, but not exactly narration; the cat (whose scraggly, high-pitched voice is provided by July) talks about his life in the wild, his life at the animal shelter, and his anticipation of the impending adoption, among other things. Even if, above, you nodded in recognition at Sophie and Jason's mental compression of the years between thirty-five and death, you may have, after this talk of cat voiceover and stopping time, dismissed The Future as cutesy.
It's not an accusation July can likely avoid unless she radically changes her work to fit the standards of indie austerity (quirkiness is a weakness! Regionally specific poor people are king!), yet it's not particularly accurate, either. With cat voices and YouTube videos as plot points, The Future does sound like bait for an imaginary and deeply stereotypical hipster audience (I'm not sure if there's another kind of hipster audience, since it's a qualifier that almost no one would use to self-identify). But it avoids meme-happy cat-lady territory because of July's skill at capturing the sadness and depth of feeling available all around us in every day life -- and doing so with her sense of humor intact. The characters may be self-conscious; the filmmaker herself comes off more self-aware.
Though it's similarly funny and affecting, The Future is a good deal stranger than Me and You and Everyone We Know, and more closely resembles July's short fiction in its use of fantastical or surreal elements; in this way, and given her attention to the characters' ticking clocks, it recalls Charlie Kaufman's obtuse, sometimes brilliant Synecdoche, New York. A few threads of July's film, like the little girl who wants to be sleep buried up to her neck in dirt, feel like sketches for past or future short stories, and aren't given attention enough to pay off, as if she can't fully let go of ensemble mode even with a minimum of characters onscreen. Maybe it's a self-consciousness of a different sort: as an actress, July's range of expression is relatively limited; happy, sad, frustrated, or confused, she tends to react with the same even-keeled tentativeness, so perhaps she relies on others for contrast.
But July is also an empathetic presence, even as Sophie shows a lot of weakness, and her film has more moments of grace, beauty, and hilarity than its occasional question marks. Even at its most willfully bizarre, The Future has a sincere ache at its core, filled with anxiety about growing old and living a meaningful life. I don't think this is cutesy, or even cute. It is sad, it is funny, and it feels true.
