Miranda July's understated debut still packs a wallop.
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In the secret manual of movie-reviewer clichés, we're not allowed to say anything is "simple" without adding the word "deceptively." But in the case of her debut feature, sound/video installation artist (Guggenheim, MOMA, Whitney Biennial) Miranda July really has created a film that's superficially artless, fresh and naïve-while delivering a modest sucker-punch.
July plays Christine, an installation artist (hmm…) and cab driver who dreams of 'til death do us part. At a shoe store, she thinks she's found her soulmate in salesman Richard (John Hawkes of
The Perfect Storm
, here looking like Sean Penn's homely second cousin), who's still wild-eyed and reeling from a recent marital separation.
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During the opening credits, we get a chance to see a sample of why his wife called it quits; in an effort to amuse his avoidant sons, he sets fire to his hand, forgetting that lighter fluid isn't like rubbing alcohol ("it doesn't so much burn off as it just…
burns
"), and thus sports a metaphorical bandage for the film's duration.
While Richard's eccentricity doesn't deter the equally freaky Christine, he shies away from her intensity-and anyway he has his hands full trying to regain the trust of Peter and Robby (Miles Thompson and the astonishing, po-faced Brandon Ratcliff), who mostly just stare blankly at their father during his cringe-worthy attempts to point out the bright side: "Some kids don't even have one home-now you get to have two!" Christine's busy too, trying to attract the attention of a cynical director at the "Center for Contemporary Art," who's insulated by sycophantic interns and artistes who are tone-deaf to irony ("I always throw in a few real things," one says modestly, of his crumpled hamburger wrapper).
Au fond, July's visual vocabulary and direction have to stay simple because her storyline is so desperately bizarre. In a development so incongruous and roll-on-the-floor funny that I hesitate to call it a subplot, seven-year-old Robby initiates an online affair with an unknown woman, using cut-and-paste amply because he can't spell, his seduction vocabulary largely consisting, age-appropriately, of the word "poop."
Me and You
brims with atmospheric yet nervy dialogue, lines that seem to fall from the sky-"soup won't be computerized," "e-mail wouldn't even exist if it weren't for AIDS." These sentences hang together only because they come from one person's mind; if July weren't acting in her own film, it might not work at all. "I want you to know that you were loved…I loved you," Christine says reverently to a doomed goldfish, riding precariously on the roof of its oblivious purchaser's car in a plastic baggie. She's daffy and sweet, like Cate Blanchett after too many pancakes and an afternoon nap, but also with a limpet-like tenacity-as when, waiting by the phone for Richard to call, she moans angrily into her bedspread, "We have a whole life to live together, you fucker!"
In a small but pungent scene, Christine experimentally films the courtship of her own feet in two pink ballerina flats, one labelled ME and the other YOU: As ME moves closer, YOU pulls away shyly. July creates characters as undefended as shoes, and her soft yet clear focus permits us to see them without guardedness or embellishment, in all their-and our-delicate, foolish mortality.
