For 37-year-old performance artist, writer and filmmaker Miranda July, life is a series of lessons about loss, mortality and the inescapable feeling that time is slipping away. And yet, despite these heavy themes, her depiction of a kind of blank and ironic human comedy has been the hallmark of her style. This maddeningly ivity has clearly connected with some and infuriates others. Well, both these camps will have much to react to as July’s sophomore film effort THE FUTURE starts its national run in theaters.

 Her first film, the widely celebrated ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE KNOW (2005), was a Sundance and Cannes-feted whimsy where July essentially played herself, a performance artist adrift in her generation and surrounded by other quirky malcontents. July and her characters seem untethered, grasping the possibilities offered by technology and the new freedoms that it has allowed, but also feeling strangely isolated and cut off from the flow of humanity. These are themes that she has examined since her early days as a spoken-word performance artist and trace back to her youth as the child of hippies in the bohemian neighborhoods of Berkeley, California. The family business, a New Age publishing company called North Atlantic Books, featured such philosophical musings as Manifesto For The Noosphere: The Next Stage of Human Consciousness, as well as books on crystals, raw foods and the DIY movement. From this cauldron of alternative thinking, July was destined to become a performer both in synch and an outsider for her generation.  

It was just a matter of time before she attempted to mount her own feature film.

  In THE FUTURE, July again stars as a kind of mirror image of herself, playing a 30-something dance instructor who feels rather unfulfilled by both her professional trajectory and her personal life. She shares a shabby, cramped apartment with her apparent soul mate, a downwardly tech technician played with ive charm by Hamish Linklater. To relieve their midlife funk, the couple decides to adopt a wounded cat, which will be delivered to them in a month’s time. Before they become “parents” and taken on the seriousness of maturity that has eluded them till then, each decides to “find themselves”. July quits her job to become an internet star, creating a new dance piece each day for 30 days, while also drifting into an adulterous affair with a divorced man with his own set of issues. Her boyfriend also leaves gainful employment to become a door-to-door fundraiser for a Greenpeace-like organization. The film alternates between the realism of the couple’s drift to moments of unabashed surrealism, exemplified by the adopted feline’s voice-over narration (squeaked by July herself), as well as existential motifs such as a talking moon and a character’s ability to stop time.  

How audiences will respond to this more mature and tonally darker tale is still an uncertainty. The themes in it of love, sex, death and the age of time, are certainly engaging and reflect a resolutely feminist and less rainbow-colored reality as both her on-screen and off-screen persona moves into middle age. As she sums up her new films themes in a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine, “It’s kind of about letting go of that feeling of my 20s, that feeling that I will do absolutely everything, I will have sex with everyone, I will got to every country. In your 30s, it’s obvious that a finite amount of those things will actually happen.” In the film, this attitude is best summed up by thee male lead: “In five years, we’ll be 40, which is basically 50. And then after 50, the rest is just loose change.” If that line resonates with you, then your place this week is to be on line (and I don’t mean the internet) to commune with July’s melancholy muse. For more information on THE FUTURE, visit: http://thefuturethefuture.com/

Sandy Mandelberger, Film New York Editor