The Future
Miranda July is an awesome, talented and interesting person that makes art and films about being rather ordinary. Her characters (in The Future, and in her amazing debut feature Me, You and Everyone We Know (2005)) are mopey hipster slacker types that might have her creative eccentricity, but certainly not her drive. I’m at odds while watching The Future, knowing that Miranda July herself is certainly living a fulfilled life, while her character, Sophie, struggles to actualize herself within the span of one month, at which point she and her boyfriend will adopt a cat, which will in turn end their lives. They’re 35 years old, after all; the cat will live five years probably (they picked a sick one to diminish their commitment); once the couple turn 40, their lives are essentially over. I place myself somewhere in between Miranda July herself, and the character(s) she plays. Closer probably to the characters.
If you had just one month to live out your vague ambitions, what would you do? Quit your dumb job? Cancel your internet? Have an affair? Sure, why not. Life is a creative, improvisational act. Maybe you’d video yourself dancing for 30 days straight and put all the dances on the internet, but maybe that’s just a bit too much work to actually do. Or maybe it’s not what you actually want to do; you just think it’s what you want to do. Where does your passion really lie??
The theme of this film isn’t so much the future as it is the present. We always wonder what life will be like in five, ten, 50 years. But really, we wonder about what to do right now. I think about the future a lot. I picture myself in a spacious room with sunlight spilling in from an ocean view, typing away at an old-school typewriter. I have an advance, or a grant, or a lot of money made from an indie film picked up at Cannes by a legitimate distributor, so I can work at my own pace and meditate on the passage of time. My lover is in the other room, and maybe we have a child. So what do I do right now? If you said submit something to a film festival, or start thinking about having a kid, or start to make enough money to afford a beach house, you’d be wrong. I’m gonna pour myself a glass of wine and stare out the window.
The Future is like all the floating anxiety inside your head: it stays with you and you don’t really know why. Sure, you’ll forget about it, see other films, get involved with more (or less) important things, but you’ll come back to it. It’s an interesting picture, made in an odd, sensitive way. The narrative structure is quite strange, the pace is slow and bewildering, the characters are just barely dimensional, and there’s a cat that narrates its scenes in a style rather off-putting. I can’t say I even enjoyed watching The Future, but I very much enjoy thinking about it afterward. That the future is something you can even think about after it’s already happened? Well that just blows my mind.
I saw the future, and it was good.
