We value Miranda July’s patience with people who cannot quite ask for company. As a director and performer, she makes that embarrassment funny and affecting, though her determination to be peculiar can wear us down.
Fi1m perspective
In Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), Christine Jesperson and Richard Swersey cannot be certain what the other has understood. July gives their courtship time to be awkward, and makes that awkwardness worth watching. She writes, directs and plays Christine, a conceptual artist drawn to a shoe salesman. This feature debut establishes the quality we most value in her work: she takes lonely people seriously without requiring them to behave sensibly.
John Hawkes, as Richard, is an important part of why it works. He makes the hesitancy between them feel plausible, giving July’s more conspicuously odd performance someone to respond to. She allows Christine to need affection without making her eccentricity a virtue in itself. We were moved by their tentative interest in each other, because neither performance makes the embarrassment of wanting company a reason to dismiss the person. The neighbourhood stories have their pleasures, but we wanted to get back to these two.
July’s performance-art background helps explain her willingness to put everyday behaviour alongside surreal elements, though it does not excuse every flourish. After the debut, The Future (2011), which she also wrote and directed, took a darker turn towards fears of mortality and commitment. Kajillionaire (2020), her third feature as writer-director, brought her concern with connection into a family of con artists. Across these films, the desire for intimacy keeps returning, often expressed through behaviour that is deliberately peculiar.
That peculiarity can become a nuisance. In Me and You and Everyone We Know, the minor characters sometimes arrive as a procession of oddities, and the scenes involving young people’s sexuality raise a more serious problem. July’s flat treatment leaves too little room to distinguish innocence from a failure to consider harm; the light comedy moves on before the discomfort has been faced. Kindness towards characters is welcome, but it cannot settle every question about how they treat one another. Start with the debut for July and Hawkes, and do not feel obliged to find every neighbour charming.
Biography
Miranda July is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, actress and author. She wrote, directed and starred in the 2005 feature Me and You and Everyone We Know, playing Christine Jesperson opposite John Hawkes. The film received the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance.
July began in performance art and short films before her feature debut. She has since written and directed The Future (2011) and Kajillionaire (2020). She is also the author of short-story collections and novels, and has a background in multimedia performance and zine publishing.
