Film: The Future (Miranda July, USA, 2011)

Apparently when you begin to think outwardly, your life is over. A couple decides to adopt a cat that only has 6 months to live. The comfort of this non-comittal arrangement is shattered when they find out that it might live for up to five years. The characters endeavour to start really plunging into the world (existentially, I guess? There's gotta be a better word for “being involved in meaningful shit”), because soon their obligations will narrow down to this not-so-insignificant adult responsibility. After the cat is gone, they'll potentially be 40+, and will have passed from the age-band that is privy to genuine experience.

It's a two-man show kind of set-up, where the characters are mostly isolated from the outside world and progressively augmenting their own perceptions and surrounding environment (although there isn't quite the horrific spiral into degeneration favoured by this narrative, i.e Deadringers). The characters in this form tend to render themselves human experiments, driven to the obligatory impulsive-life-change gestures to “see what happens”. They strip things down and open up to a new course, pulling themselves off the electrical grid, quitting their jobs and drawing new relationships from uncertain sources (i.e. randomly-acquired phone numbers). But a loss of momentum inevitably follows as their new occupations bob in the water and their new friends provide no shortage of tedium to swim through.

Seasoned with many comically awkward moments and whimsical, searching dialogue, this is the kind of film that makes a lot of reviewers use the word “generation”. It's interesting that the work of Miranda July, as elven as it might seem, has established her as some sort of arbiter of contemporary life. The Future's particular way of navigating our own misguided Peter Panism does emanate a “currentness,” as though speaking more directly to young(ish) thinking people than most. We, the over-exposed (sub)urban masses, braising in our own mythopoetic possibilities and constantly getting stung by the feeling of “oh shit, everything must happen now!” Drunk on romanticism, but emotionally-stunted. Charged by a sense of immediacy, but without a sense of direction.

Where is this all going? Life is just too aesthetically overwhelming to know how to act. If only we could stop time and take it all in (hint: you can, but as the film warns in its lyrical flight into the supernatural, don't use this power as a form of escape). Either way, Miranda July's vision of the sensory bouillabaisse of today's experience is so elegant and enigmatic, the word “postmodern” would just kill the mood. The wonderfully kaleidoscopic Me And You And Everyone We Know might have been more satisfying for me, but the intensified focus of The Future is a very prescient beam of a talented filmmaker's singular style. Did I mention it's narrated by a cat who seems grafted directly from a Don Delillo novel? Although I've never seen him use a non-human speaking part, I think this could be his inspiration to start.