The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 5)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 February

* Contains (almost nothing but) spoilers *

Probably full circle, and definitely the end of this group of postings, and to that alleged film The Future* (2011) and how, no less, it was sold to me by that clearly blasphemous publication, Picturehouse Recommends - sooner read Uncle Joe Stalin Rather Unequivocally Recommends**, and at least know where I stand and the permitted level of adoration!

I am confronted, once more, by that whole-page image of July*** (I think that the background has been edited out to make it more stark, as far as I recollect), leaning urgently out of the window as if - and this is the clever bit!? - some emergency is happening beneath her, and she is doing her best to intervene.

Rather than, when they both know that he should not be able to hear her (given where they both live), shouting nonethless - I forget what she does shout - to see if someone she has spoken to one the phone for the first time after all does. The image, as I say, suggests a crisis, because one wouldn't - unless Sophie (July) - go to the window with a hair-dryer and stick one's torso so emphatically out of it just to shout to someone who's not there, but it provides a great opportunity for the hair-dryer, a love-gift that has just been presented, to be pointed out of the window and suggest, in a phallic way, the direction of events and where her interest lies.

Redolent of that crazy connection that there is between teenage friends, who might try such a thing, rather than a woman of 35 trying to engage with an older man (Marshall) whom she probably didn't even meet when her partner Jason talked to Marshall and his daughter, and Jason, who had seen the drawing of the daughter's hamster (or whatever it was - possibly to raise funds for the animal welfare centre, possibly to line Marshall's pocket, as I don't recall, and don't intend to find out) bought it for Sophie.


The facing page is in two parts, the top about the film, the bottom about July. Here, mainly in order, are some quotations from what the write-up alleges (mostly, as if it were stating facts) from the top part, with a commentary as to why I take issue of them and believe that they built up a sigificantly misleading portrait of The Future:


July returns in typically charming fashion
I think that it’s very much a matter of opinion whether this film is charming – a Sundance jury might have thought it so, where a differently constituted one might not – and might not have found any real depths in this piece of work.


A film about confronting the stark realities of adulthood
Well, to be honest, this couple (meaning a pair of people, not an entity) does not have a clue about any sort of reality, and, if so, they have left it half their lives to address things that another generation does much younger than 35 (please see below - they are not a thirtysomething couple).


After weighing up all the pros and cons
I must confess that, aiming to skip the trailers, I missed the very opening minutes, and only met the three of them (including the cat, who confronts stark realities, for my money, far more meaningfully than Jason or Sophie does) when the humans have gone to collect the feline.

Only to be told that, allowing time for healing of the wounded (bandaged) paw, they must come back in twenty-eight days (or was it a month? I don’t care). They also learn that the thing that they have clearly been banking on, life-expectancy of six months, could be five years with love and care.

So whatever they weighed up offscreen to me, the two were never looking for a pet capable of surviving, but, frankly, an opportunity for short-term do-gooding, not a commitment to an animal’s life and well-being.

Of course, if they were wholly cynical (which they are too soft to be), they would go away, realize their mistake, and just call in to cancel the arrangement. But what arrangement? The clinic is crazy enough to say (words put into its mouth by July, and purely for reasons of the pretty thin plot) that it will put the cat down, after feeding and watering it for almost a month, if they do not show up – brilliant ethics for an animal shelter, and an insane way of spending someone’s money on sick or injured animals that you end up killing****.


[They] decide to take the next big step in their relationship: they are going to adopt a cat
As outlined above, they have no intention, at the outset, that this cat will be around very long – what big step? It’s more like an extended version of pet-sitting, with a limited duration. I do not know whether the clinic misled them initially, but they know that what they believed was wrong, and somehow, with a limited access to their own psyches, feel trapped with their previous decision. The write-up does not acknowledge any of this in:

But before they can bring their new pet back to their cost apartment, they will have to wait an entire month for the rescue centre to give them the all-clear
So, it’s hugely convenient that, when they expect that they are collecting the cat, they have a month in their questionably cosy dwelling (which may or may not be given a once-over by the centre) in which to regret being tied down – a bit like going to the dentist for an appointment for a filling, only to find that it is just one at which you are asked what sort of injection you’d like, and you have to come back another day for the filling.


With the big day marked on the calendar, our couple soon begin to fret over the consequences of their commitment
Yes, they fret straightaway about learning that it could be five years, but there is no actual commitment: they could pick up the phone and say ‘We’ve changed our minds’ – and let the centre kill the cat then and there? – is that the issue?


This mog’s going to tie them down; they will be trapped in a round-the clock routine for the next 10 years of their lives
It may be that what I missed is that this an HIV-positive LA cat, and thus that such a routine could be relevant, otherwise do these people really not know how capable cats are of looking after themselves? (They also, then, cannot have any friends who could do pet-sitting so that they go on vacation, and don’t know that, anyway, such help can be hired.)

Where ten years crept in from, I do not know, but Jason makes a rather fatuous speech that has been written for him to say that 5 years onto their 35 is 40, 40 is the new 50, and there’s nothing worthwhile in life then, so they are effectively dead now. Sadly, not very convincing, and even The Sophists of old came up with better reasons than that for the things of which they wished to persuade others: but it does need to allow those watching the film to believe these two credible, and their lacklustre thinking doesn’t do that.


[D]ay by day they drift apart. Until, that is, a moment of catharsis reunites their souls and reconnects them with their suburban world.
Funny, not in the film - of the same name - that I saw. Yes, they drift apart, but what is this cathartic moment supposed to be? Whatever it is, nothing reunites anybody's souls, and the rest is just fanciful padding!

Narrated by Paw-Paw (July herself putting on her best purr), The Future is a contemplative indie gem from one of American cinema's most enlightening free spirits.
So am I seriously being told that this film is enlightening? (And, yes, that was the cat's name, but, no, it doesn't narrate the film - it just narrates its own experience in the rescue centre of getting excited about going somewhere else and being happy, then reconciliation to not going there, then being killed, but there's an afterlife, so that's OK, and really contemplative, too!)

This may just be enthusiastic opinion, but it is making some pretty big claims, for July and The Future. In the section about her:

Like her films, she is understated, she is a citizen of a world far removed from the showy artificiality of Hollywood: the real world.
Oh, I think that I might vomit! It's not the studios' gizmos, hype and big budgets, so it must be good and appeal to those who prefer arthouse films - law of the excluded middle, again, for even if all Hollywood did = Bad, it doesn't follow that non-Hollywood = Good.

I end, speechless (at both ever having read this twaddle / seen the film), and feeling only that there is an enormous effort in this write-up to strong-arm me into why I should see / like it, viz.

Call her kooky or cute, but there is a truth in July's works that distinguishes them from other like-minded films. Without the slightest shade of pretence, The Future captures a tentative step along the potholed corridor towards middle age and an existential dead end*****.


End-notes

* Even Philip French (who he?) doesn't like it - he dismisses it in one outraged paragraph at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/nov/06/the-future-miranda-july-review.

** By the way, none of this 57 varieties stuff about which I've just piffled on (at, funnily enough, 57 alleged varieties) - one bloody tin of soup and, if you're lucky, you might be at the head of the queue when that one tin is on the shelf!

But it beats all this possibility for deliberation as to whether this bloody 18-month-cured prosciutto is better than a 12-month-cured packet of real Parma ham... Reminiscent of 'Should I see The Future, or save my pennies for The Artist?'?

*** With just the title top right in pinkish capitals, and some details of actors, director, etc., bottom right.

**** Perhaps Sophie and Jason are paying (even though they went there to collect the cat)?

***** There is another sentence, but I just don't feel the need to inflict it on both myelf or anyone reading this posting.


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The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 January

The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 1)

* Contains spoilers *

For sure, there's no easy way to do it, when:

* It can be hard to avoid trailers totally, which - whoever makes the things - dish up (as Percy Grainger described his arrangements of Bach) bits of the film (and maybe even bits that don't make it to the version that goes on general release and which you will see) in an often unrepresentative way¹ ;

* The man who can make Midnight in Paris (2011), no great masterpiece though it actually is², can also produce Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), where, I believe, the point of interest is not Vicky or Cristina (whichever is which) and what they get up to, but very nearly the third named, if it weren't for the performance from Ms Cruz;

* Likewise, we were given Pan's Labyrinth (2006) by the director who followed it up with (?!) Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010);

* Not knowing Luc Besson's canon that well (except Subway (1985) [and also The Fifth Element (1997)]), but being well aware that it was not that / either type of film, The Lady (2011) still wasn't what I expected at all in the wake of 2010's Festival opener (which said a lot, but probably not too much, in its title), The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec³ (2010);

* Even the publicity image used for The Future (2011), of much of the top half of Miranda July protruding diagonally from a sash-window (and dressed in a frilly white(ish) dress with black features), is a striking one. However, it actually captures a moment, for me, of utter inconsequence (save to demonstrate a write-up's description of audiences finding her work / acting either 'kooky or cute')⁴.


Which leads us, neatly or otherwise, on to Part 2 - to be found at The Future or How do you choose a satisying film? (Part 2)...



End-notes

¹ Trailers often enough create a longing to see where that moment fits in, what happens next, when it turns out not to be that interesting. (And, of course, they (distributors, directors, whoever) know that it's not that interesting, but they show it to you out of context to create an appetite that they know that they cannot satisfy.)

² Review to come, some time: it was started in the third week of its run, and unnecessarily long delayed, although oft picked at in the meantime.

³ Call it versatility (DVD, again), I guess, which is what one gets in the range of Woody Allen's work, from mock-documentary Zelig (1983) about Leonard Zelig, 'the human chameleon', to a fraught, but chilling, drama in Interiors (1978).

⁴ Except that, for what one could loosely call The Future's plot, it is part of the zany way in which (as writer) July chooses to set her character up with another man: he is being asked to say whether he can hear the shout that she is making - or about to make, or has just made - from said window, although, from what he has already told her (us) about where he is in LA, he is almost assuredly out of earshot.


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An empty future

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 November

A great director, an Allen, can write for him- or herself perfectly and bring it off.

Miranda July has created, in Sophie, something that she could not inhabit - yes, the character is meant to have an awkwardness about and with herself, but the July behind it is not comfortable with that*.

By contrast, I can imagine a younger Diane Keaton playing this role brilliantly, with all of the nervous energy, but actually being a credible - not just rather irritating and inadequate - Sophie. Is Keaton one of July's heroines? I'd be very surprised, if not...


End-notes

* Actually, it's a bit like Rapunzel - children might accept the story, and not think of the physics behind golden tresses being let down and the handsome suitor climbing up (which, by the way, is not the least of Marshall's charms, even if he is a bit Kirk Douglas - more Frog Prince than Prince Charming), whereas wiser heads can appreciate that she remains attached by her own to the tresses, and the whole of her, or it, will end up being pulled swiftly out of the tower window.


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The cat in The Future

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 November

The cat in The Future

No, not what we will breed friends like my Molly to be, as I understood our Egyptian colleagues did some millennia back to give rise to her (with her red streak of tortoiseshell), but rather who gives Paw-Paw spoken words in this rather dismal no.

I am sure that someone claimed that it was Ms July - if only that didn't have connotations - but, at the same time, I recollect someone else having a credit :

Now that's, maybe, where I have been misled by the credits, as, now that I think of it, some animal actors have names that are indistinguishable in form from those of a human actor... I was, perhaps, looking at the form of Paw-Paw as shown in the only shot that I saw where he is not just animatronic, and not very convincing (in fact, it seemed like a pretty poor attempt to gloss over the failure to have engaged a co-operative animal actor, now that I think of it).

Can one rely on what IMDb tells us, in the absence of any desire to see this again? - or opportunity, as it lasted just two weeks at my cinema, from which I infer the lack of an audience (maybe 20 people watched it when I did, on its last day).


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IS this The Future?

Writing about The Future (2011) is / as post-trauma therapy

More views of – or after – Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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18 November

* Contains spoilers *

Writing about The Future (2011) is / as post-trauma therapy

One should be wary of having expectations of any film, based on a write-up in the cinema, or even a trailer.

Amy told me that the cat narrated the film, but that it was all right, when I said that such a thing could be dreadful. Thankfully, it did not narrate any more than its own part, in a slightly soporific – or perhaps just lingeringly slow – way, a little reminiscent of Miranda July’s own speech-patterns. (It is supposed to have lived on the streets, and dreaded the nights, but it just seemed like a perfectly likeable and well-adjusted tabby to me.)

If July’s character Sophie or that of Jason, the man with whom she lives, were not regular partakers of illicit substances, which I guess would not be shown in a film rated 12A, it would be surprising. The way that it showed these people, both wedded to their Apple laptops as they shared the sofa from opposite ends, and with Jason saying that he was just getting comfortable, when invited by Sophie to bring a glass of water, was telling: it seemed that neither of them wanted to do anything for the other that did not have to be done.

Four initial elements, which are dwelt on, are where ‘the development’ starts: the cat, which cannot be picked up until 26 April, by when its injured paw should be healed, and, as they are told when they go to collect it, they euthanize at the clinic; the drawing of a child and her pet, which Jason buys for Sophie when he talk to the girl, and then her father (who drew it), at the rescue centre; Jason’s claimed ability to stop time; and Sophie’s secret friend in the form of a sweat-shirt, bearing the legend C’est la nuit, which would not endear her to the cat.

They had gathered that the cat would be with them for just six months, but I missed the very opening, unless this was just Paw-Paw narrating in the dark (which does not make for easily finding a seat). The short-term reward is seemingly part of what attracts the couple to adopting the cat, but when they learn that, with good carers, the cat could live for five or six years, their balance is thrown, nay their whole lives (and let’s suspend disbelief as to what they would have been told before). It’s as if, perhaps reasonably, they are too meek to say that they cannot make a commitment of that length to the cat, and too caring just to leave it until 27 (or 28) April to collect it.

So the premise is that they must not waste time and make the most of the intervening month (four weeks ?), which, Jason reckons is the only worthwhile part of their lives left. After they have both left their jobs, it paralyses Sophie, and leads Jason into searching for patterns (which he duly finds), but, with very little self-knowledge (neither character possesses it – the cat can tell us more about who it is, what it thinks, and why), she dismisses the sweat-shirt from her entourage for not helping her inability with a self-imposed project for which she does not seem the ideal candidate, and, finding numbers on the back of the drawing, contacts Marshall, who made it.

When Sophie has done more with her time sexually then Jason, who spends it at the house of a man from whom he bought a hair-dryer (seemingly, Sophie and Jason did not have one), Jason invokes his power of stopping time to prevent her telling him about Marshall. He talks to the moon (who sounded a lot like Sophie’s lover), who tells Jason what the changing date is: the moon is not female, as we might think, or changeable, but powerless, and fixed as a full moon).

With everything halted outside, Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor seems an obvious inspiration, but I wonder whether Superman stopping the earth turning and sending it backwards to save Lois Lane is a stronger one, though without the hero’s supreme effort and emotion. July gives us an image of a world that is frozen, until Jason goes to the ocean and assists the moon, by breaking the waves (it does not bear thinking what the moon should have to do with this).

This is not really Jason’s motivation, but to rescue the cat – the moon tells him that there are a few hours left of 26 April, but, after the trip to the beach, Paw-Paw is nonetheless not rescued in time on 27 April. Paw-Paw tells us how waiting became death in the cage (not quite my understanding of how pet animals are put down), and concepts such as ‘I’ ceased to exist as he came to bathe and rejoice in the light.

An ambiguous reunion occurs when Sophie looks out Jason, and he offers her nothing, which she accepts; he also offers for her to stay the night and then leave for good; she seems to have longer than that – Time itself has become rather ambivalent – and maybe they will drift on together. (Equally, she could go back to Marshall.) Perhaps they, too, will come to the comfort of which Paw-Paw talks.

The dilemma is whether this film was bound to be what it was, or could have offered me something else in ‘a last-ditch bid to taste freedom’, which depends on an artificial countdown (except for Paw-Paw’s continued existence). Obviously, people do end up having affairs on a rather slight basis, and perhaps Sophie’s is about what she can still do and is more of a revelation to her. (If, that is, one doesn’t suppose that something must have happened in the 31 years before she met Jason, though maybe his way of being with her has knocked her faith in herself.)

In any case, she is suspicious of him being happy when she is not; he wants to hold time where it is and see if he can prevent her revealing her infidelity – although he knows with whom and must know what. As I said, both of them seem only to be prepared to do for the other what has to be done. As, from memory, one of my favourite group’s Ezio’s, songs says (and maybe some of these songs say a whole lot more in five minutes than in ninety):

You only share the things you don’t own
Makes me fear that you’ll be forever alone


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