David O'ConnellMIFF 2011: The Future
August 1st 2011 01:45
You either respond to the quirky, minimalist stylings of Miranda July or you don’t. Her second feature The Future (2011), is another series of oddly skewed perceptions of the world. As in Me, You and Everyone We Know (2005) the film’s success is largely determined by how humourous you find July’s own performance. I don’t think she’s a riot by any stretch but I do appreciate her endearing way of stringing together innocuous encounters into a freeform, loosely-assembled narrative.
Sophie (July) has been with her boyfriend Jason (Hamish Linklater) for four years. They decide to adopt a badly injured cat but must wait a month to see if it heals. Informed that it may still have a few years to live if appropriately cared for, the couple is confronted with that void stretching inexorably into middle age known as The Future.
Have their own lives suffered at the hands of an apathetic misdirection, leaving them unfulfilled and with only a blurred definition of their own identities? Their relationship reaches a crisis when Sophie’s curiosity about the world as a broader sphere provides access to an affair with a man (David Warshofsky) who isn’t just a reflective surface - a male counterpart in the way Jason is.
July’s strangest decision – and one that falls flat – is to use the cat, Paw-Paw, as an occasional narrator whose nonsensical overview of life gets bogged in generalities. This misstep aside, The Future is replete with welcome July-isms, those arbitrary oddball observations and droll non-sequiturs that fill the landscape but never really amount to much. The opening 40 minutes are the film’s strongest; a dose of magical realism prevents the second half from reaching a more satisfying resolution.
The film sputters to a halt - a disappointment to be sure - but there are more than enough laugh-out-loud moments to sustain it. I appreciate that July is tapping into some commonly held apprehensions of 30-somethings too, albeit in a resolutely idiosyncratic, roundabout way.
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