Annoying, are the people who can do everything so well. It’s like the Maths nerd who’s better than you at football, or your mum being able to hold her ale better than you can. It just doesn’t seem fair. Miranda July is one of these people. Miranda, a performance artist, decided to make a film; she wrote it, directed it, and co-starred in it, it cost about £500,000 to make (the woeful Stealth cost £80 Million) and went on to win the Camera D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. More importantly; her film Me and You and Everyone We Know happens to be one the most absorbing, profound, quirk-some and simply one the best films in years.
Me and You… centres around the fractured relationship between struggling artist Christine Jesperson (Miranda July) and recently divorced father of two Richard Swersey (John Hawkes). The film opens with Christine’s eccentric performance art; she stares at photographs on her wall of family, friends, and sunsets and speaks of ‘everyday being lived with grace, like it’s our last, now let’s kiss and make it real’. Simply describing the scene makes it smack of pretentiousness, but the deliverance and humour involved sets up the personal and disconnected tone of the film, with each character trying to forge their own relationships.
This surreal tone will place Me and You… outside of mainstream adoration, but the film never falls into the potholes of independent-pretentiousness; instead the dry humour and beautiful ambience make it at once accessible, yet pondersome. The film’s main exploration is of the struggle of keeping innocence. Whilst going through the final procedures of his divorce, Richard decides to illustrate his fear and anxiety by setting his hand on fire in front of his children. Later, he explains he was trying to save his life, but failed.
What July does most proficiently is juxtapose the difficulties of relationships between the child characters alongside the difficulties of the adults. The blue-eyed optimisms of Christine crash against the jaded mindset of Richard. In one affecting scene, Christine sees Richard and happily invites herself into his car, wherein Richard harshly states that the innocent gesture was unappreciated; Christine’s face shows the effect of the emotional burning beautifully.
Perhaps controversial to some is that Me and You… includes children experimenting with sexual relationships (a male neighbour writes explicit ‘love letters’ to 14 years old girls, the girls later give a ‘Jimmy-ha-ha’ to a young teenager, and a small boy engages in on-line sexual conversations with an unknowing woman). It may cause a knee-jerk reaction from some audiences, but that would be unjust, as the scenes are not sexual in the standard perception, they are not constructed as ‘harrowing’, they are instead vehicles for the underlying battle with purity.
The film is awash with indiosyncrasies, from all the wonderfully written and performed characters, but this is not an experiment in caricature, it instead is a weighty - even existential piece - about love and longing, which just happens to have some of the funniest one-liners you’ll hear. Miranda July must also confess to being an independent cinema fan herself, with some scenes recalling Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse, Terry Zwiggoff’s Ghost World and more accurately, Sophia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation; with her aptitude for accurately portraying relationships and selecting a wonderful and complementing soundtrack.
But Me and You… is far more than an amalgamation of influences; it deals with bold and dark subject matters justly, and does so with great compassion and authenticity. But contrary to the subject matter, it remains one the most touching, original, witty and ultimately uplifting film experiences you can have. A truly excellent film.