Me and You and Everyone We Know

I had the good fortune to see this film last night at a Sundance Film Festival screening in Salt Lake City. Having viewed a few of Miranda July's shorts on her website), I hoped this film would live up to the level set there. It does. July plays the lead character in what turns out to be an ensemble of people, each with his/her own quirks, who are somehow linked together (most simply by being neighbors). This movie is made up of what might be a string of perfect little short films. Each scene builds on the previous scene, adding one more enticing facet to a personality; one more little twist to a story. By the final scene, each character has as much depth and complexity as some of the real people we know. Indeed, one might wish that everyone was as interesting as the characters in this film.

Me and you... is the type of movie that you can come in at any point and get into the characters and the plot.I saw it at the U.S.A. Film Festival in Dallas.I missed the beginning,and I heard a few people walked out because of a soft porn scene.I absolutely loved the movie, the actors were perfect for the parts,all of them. I noticed that I was actually sitting next to John Hawke, who was very a funny, honest character.(He was laughing too)Expect to laugh,laugh,and giggle,I was very impressed.Miranda J. is brilliant,she is a really talented actress, who plays a quirky struggling artist,very funny.This movie touches on things that we think, and feel everyday,but are scared to tell.The characters do a great job of making you feel and love each and every one of them.

I was fortunate enough to see this at the IFC screening a couple of nights ago, and it was truly one of the most refreshing and genuinely enjoyable films I have seen in a long time. It reminded me of an artsier, less commercial Garden State with a female protagonist. And unlike Garden State (which is still a great film), it captured those random, lovely, hard-to-put-into-words bits of human emotion without having to try as hard.

Two very pleasant surprises were the young actors who played the shoe salesmen's sons, more specifically, the six-year-old. I won't spoil the movie for any of you who are planning on seeing it, but the scenes involving the kids on the computer is priceless - it's going to have me laughing for a few years, I think.

I was disappointed that Miranda July did not stay for the entire screening because I would have loved to congratulate her on such an amazing movie. I hope she gets the recognition she deserves!

Miranda July's "Me and You and Everyone We Know" might be the most miraculous first fiction feature by an American in 3 or 4 years; it's rivaled only by Andrew Bujalski's "Funny Ha Ha." Christine (July) stalks the recently separated Richard (John Hawkes), who would try anything to impress his kids, and gets third degree burns for his trouble. His elder son, Peter (Miles Thompson) longs for connections that go beyond instant gratification, while the younger Robby (Brandon Ratcliff) gets all the funniest lines, mostly copied and pasted from cybersex chats.

"Me and You" is about the act of pretending and about performance as life, but first of all it's about extremely likable characters played by likable actors, foremost among them July herself, whose Carole Lombard-meets-Laurie Anderson deep ditz may be a complex stack of masks upon masks, but is more likely just the way she is.

The movie is notable for what isn't in it - both malice and pain are almost absent. Removing malice - July's world is one in which a kid can safely walk alone through some seedy parts of Los Angeles - is unfashionable, brave and, given the gentle tone of the piece, necessary. But the absence of pain isn't intentional: July would like us to feel the loneliness of the characters. But their isolation is more a trait of their personalities than a source of suffering. In this respect, the movie is perhaps too glossy for its own good. There's one excellent exception, revolving around a granddaughter's photo by an elderly woman's bedside, which becomes a substitute for a shared life that dissolved too soon.

The scene that everyone picks out is the walk to Tyrone Street. Richard and Christine decide the walk to the intersection will stand in for the relationship they're not having: first the unrelieved joy of being together, then the getting bored with each other, then the fighting and the split. Only they keep chatting flirtily, about whether the walk represents a year and a half or twenty, until they get to the corner, and then we wonder how they can possibly go their separate ways. Although this is as great as anything in the first 75 minutes of "Before Sunset," its emphasis is much more on romantic comedy than the rest of the movie. There are more typical scenes that approach this quality. A goldfish on the roof of a car. A child running his fingers through a woman's hair. A picture of a bird in a tree, in a tree. And the ending, where it seems human actions are motivating the sunrise.

The scene I consider the finest is a quiet one: Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), a tween spending her childhood preparing for life as a homemaker, gets a gift from Peter: a plush bird. ("It's for your daughter.") It would be unusual merely for depicting a platonic friendship between kids of different genders and different ages. But it's remarkable for crystallizing what it seems every filmmaker is trying to say these days: that there's something to be gained from thinking like a child. Through July's lens, it doesn't seem like a regression: no redundant literalization of fantasy is necessary. The achievement of "Me and You and Everyone We Know" is to show how the mundane moments of our lives can be mundanely transformed by imagination.

The main reason that films can grab us and last is not because of characters or situations, or story. Yes, those are the things we see and grab, but if the film doesn't spin an engaging world, there'll be nothing worth grabbing.

Now here's a case where the world this filmmaker creates is so wonderful, we want to grab everything. Its incoherent, a set of vignettes, but all coherently placed to circumnavigate this wonderful set of dynamics.

Its a world where bad things exist but don't cut deeply. Where innocence penetrates reality. Where fate applies but is seen. Where art exists but only as pretense for life. Where communication always has a sparkle of wonder. Where age is irrelevant and hope is always privately platformed without dependence.

A dear friend brought me to "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing." This is a dear friend and I sincerely tried to dissolve myself in the world of the thing. But the cracks didn't line up, and my being and that world couldn't interpenetrate. It think it is purely a matter of skill, in knowing how to discard the things that get in the way. This does, this film here.

The woman behind this film is admirable. By that I mean she is to be admired for knowing enough about us to find the things that disturbingly endear. And I admire her for finding a place for herself in how this is presented to us. Its all so perfect that we have to assume that there is a deep selfawareness in her, as deep as her intuitions are.

I hope to see more of her. I think we can trust her with large bits of ourselves.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.