July: The Future (2011)

Miranda July’s second film is just as haunting and melancholy as her debut. Originally titled Satisfaction, it’s about a couple in their mid-thirties – Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) – who decide to cement their relationship by adopting a stray, injured kitten named Paw Paw, who narrates the film, and is voiced by July. They’re given one month to get their lives in order while Paw Paw is recovering at the vet, and it quickly comes to feel like the last month before the future arrives in its entirety, the last month in which the present and future are distinct from each other. Almost as soon as the film starts, the present and future start to fuse and petrify into something else, eventually splitting Sophie and Jason into the present future and the future present, as they embark upon a pair of diverging universes and timelines. That creates something of an apocalyptic atmosphere, the dissolution of time that signals the arrival of end time, but by taking end time as literally and matter-of-factly as possible, July creates quite an unusual apocalypse – this vision of L.A. just gets quieter and quieter, cuter and cuter, like a tablet that goes out of date the moment you start using it. Nowhere in July’s oeuvre is cuteness quite as disempowering as it is here – everyone and everything is too swathed in adoration and warmth, too connected to all the manifold presences stroking and petting our every move, to have any kind of autonomy. And as the apocalypse approaches, July imperceptibly morphs with all the tchotchkes littering her apartment, in a kind of becoming-doll that cries out for the poses, postures and blocking of performance art as much as cinema. From that perspective, it’s more like Paw Paw adopts Sophie and Jason than vice versa, perhaps explaining why it’s so difficult to figure out whether we’re seeing things from Paw Paw’s perspective or July’s. And the perspective of Paw Paw-July creates an L.A. ensemble drama that’s perhaps even more original than Me and You and Everyone We Know – in a world without a future, there’s simply no difference between incidental encounters and the relationships they might have become, or the allegories they might have told, literalising the most amorphous of American cities into a sprawl of permanent moments.