Miranda July’s newest film venture, a beautiful and personal feature called The Future, maintains the same conversational explicitness, sexuality, strangeness, and intense intimacy characteristic of her first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know. July writes in a familiar tone to engage the audience in an extremely candid way. The Future develops through these same kinds of communication: jokes, small talk, moments of physical intimacy or connection.
July compliments this conversational tone with a symbolic level of communication in The Future, which she says pulls from her performance upon which the film is based. At a roundtable discussion in which I participated last week, July discussed the importance of symbols in understanding meaning: big things often “aren’t based in tangible reality,” so July says her characters use metaphors or symbols to approach such big ideas. July and her co-star, Hamish Linklater, portray this anxiety with careful intensity, often holding onto small symbols like life rafts until the last possible moment. Linklater’s character indulges genuinely in this clinging, while July’s character forces herself to not cling (down to the details: she even disconnects from the internet). July described her own character, who portrays a strange yet familiar combination of selfishness and self-destructiveness, as “representing the qualities in myself of which I am most afraid.”
