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Me and You and Everyone We Know
Indie cinema's love letter to the suburbs.
BY DYLAN BEHAN.
Suburban indie films usually mean lashings of misanthropy and misery - not so for American director Miranda July's debut feature Me And You And Everyone We Know. A sunnily weird and optimistic montage centering around overcoming obstacles to fall in love, the nature of diverse modern relationships and children accidentally coming of age on the internet, it's won awards everywhere from Sundance to Cannes for being so different, daring and touching. Without sounding too much like I'm pitching for a poster quote, the yearning plot, absurdly real ensemble of characters and ethereal dialogue all add up to making this one of the most delightful films of the year, embracing oddball creativity in an age of homogenisation. For July, herself a renowned performance and multimedia artist, she didn't want to make a hit film as much as she wanted to express her skewed "Kaleidoscopic" view of life.
"I think a lot of people love the business of it (making films), get a real thrill out of being in that. And I think I like it despite that. So I'm wary and protective of myself and in a way I'm really happy that I have these other things to do because they remind me that expressing yourself is just that. It's not an industry."
"I think people always want it to be, for it to be a sort of revenge. No, none of that actually happened but I certainly know the feeling of being both ambitious and awkward, even shy, which is a weird combination, definitely me. I think I came up with that kind of dynamic because I was interested in showing a few different kinds of relationships, and that (the artist dealing with galleries) was a kind of bureaucratic one."
The most memorable and funny scene in the film come when Richard's two pre-teen sons stumble upon the grown up world via an adult internet chat room, re-interpreting the sexuality around them into their own world. The other kids in the film also deal with impending adult hood and sexual misadventure in various ways, albeit in an innocent and hilarious way. This subject however meant July found it impossible to find funding in America, though thankfully a rep from Britain's FilmFour came to the rescue at a Film Maker's Lab networking event.
"Out of about twenty different meetings with companies, (it was FilmFour) who was just like 'Wow, this is great', (and) who was totally unabashed but not thrown by the fact we didn't want to cast stars, I wanted to be in it myself, the child sexuality, ensemble cast. All those things which completely made the project unviable to every other company totally charmed him, and that's when you know you have the right company."
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Directors David Cronenberg Miranda July Walter Salles Guillermo Del Toro American Splendor Morgan Spurlock Tarnation's Jonathon Caouette What The Bleep...
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The film centers around Richard, a Ted Bundy-esque shoe salesman father (played memorably by John Hawkes), who's trying to trying to raise his two internet-addicted black kids after a recent divorce left him emotionally and physically scarred (the film opens with either a cry for help or a trick gone wrong, in the form of him setting his own hand on fire). July steps in playing Christine, a frustrated unaccomplished performance artist who falls for the uninterested shoe man, but she insists the role isn't autobiographical.