July: Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)

Miranda July’s debut is a ensemble drama set in the L.A. suburbs, revolving around an aspiring performance artist (July) and a struggling shoe salesman (John Hawkes). However, where earlier L.A. ensemble dramas used apparently incidental or random encounters to gesture towards some emergent form of connectivity, for July that revelation is very much in the past. From the very beginning, it’s clear that her version of L.A. has been saturated, even oversaturated, with its connective potential, which isn’t to say that incidental encounters aren’t still important, but that they’re important in a different way – this isn’t a film that uses small moments to gesture towards the city in its totality, but rather a film that realises that the city in its totality has been entirely displaced by the small moments that it elaborates. That gives the film quite an unusual tone and pace – no moment is more important than any other, just as there’s no real difference in scale or scope from moment to moment. Instead, July strives to make each moment feel more momentary than the last, and to make each sequence feel more incidentally specific to where it’s taking place, to the point that it often plays more like a work of site-specific performance art than film proper, installing us in the city rather than allegorising our distance from it. That, in turn, creates an odd, distended warmth – every space feels oversaturated with late afternoon light, warm as a bedroom, shot through with the pink-orange hues that July has made her own – but it’s a sad kind of warmth, as July tries to get infinitesimally closer to closeness, the punctuation of everyday life. Perhaps that’s why writing feels so tactile in the film – prescient that most of the text we now see is backlit by the melancholy glow of social media, July’s characters are endlessly stroking typography, communing with language more than ever before, to the point where its texture and physicality overwhelms any message of intimacy it could possibly carry. And that tends to dissolve all the boundaries supposedly reinforced by digital media – between the very young and the very old, between normality and transgression – into a single, sombient enunciation, not unlike some of the more hypnotic performance pieces of Laurie Anderson. At one point, July comes across a frame that continually says ‘I love you’, and the film often feels framed in the same way, making for a suburban melodrama that’s definitively post-stranger danger, if only because no-one’s really a stranger anymore, or everyone’s a stranger, obscene and homely at the same time.