I really don’t want to waste this space on the piffle that’s hitting our big screens this week — not Rush Hour III, and certainly not Cake, which went straight to DVD in the States and has gone straight to the Short Cuts column on these pages. While good movies wait patiently for limited Cinema Nouveau screening space (in some cases for two or three years), today we have a Friday with only bad comedy-karate and teen-girl romance on offer. The attitude seems to be ‘Let them watch Cake.”
So thank heavens for the Labia in Cape Town, which is bringing in an American indie pic called Me and You and Everyone We Know, winner of an award at the Sundance festival and of the Camera d’Or for best first film at Cannes in 2005. It opens at the Labia and at Hyde Park Nu Metro next week (September 7), but I’ve decided unilaterally to cover it this week, and hope that our readers will still remember it next week. I’m sure they — you — will. Make a note now, if you have to.
Me and You and Everyone We Know is the kind of film that gets described as quirky. And quirky it is, but that’s really only in contrast to the relentlessly homogenised product that comes out of the American mainstream and its epigones. Try to make a movie that encompasses at least some of life’s rich oddness and you will come out with quirky at the very least, if you don’t end up with something entirely surreal.
Me and You and Everyone We Know is also the kind of film that gets described as precious — in the sense of awkwardly self- conscious. And that it is, too, but not in a bad way, or that’s how I feel. I enjoyed it a lot, though I realise that some might find it overly cute in an artsy fashion.
It opens with Miranda July, as a performance artist somewhat in the Laurie Anderson vein, working on a video and/or performance piece. July was in fact a performance artist before she became the writer, director and star of this movie. Presumably, then, she’s playing herself here, more or less (or even sending herself up a bit), and the tone of the little storylets she tells in her artworks has much in common with the overall tone of Me and You and Everyone We Know, which has a sharp eye for the strangeness that underlies the apparently ordinary; in fact, the strangeness is the ordinary.
Contrasted with July’s character, Christine, is Richard (John Hawkes), whom we see splitting with his wife right at the start of the movie — and then engaging in some mildly spectacular self-destruction. Richard works in a shoe shore and soon enough Christine will be there to buy shoes. The encounters between Christine and Richard form a central narrative thread, but around it is a constellation of related storylines: Richard’s two unhappy sons, the teenage girls who flirt ambiguously with one of Richard’s co-workers, and the thin-lipped curator to whom Christine submits her work. Oh, yes, and there’s a goldfish.
A rich tapestry, indeed, but one made of the small gestures of everyday life. If character is destiny, as Heraclitus said in about 500BC, then July has a lot to work with here. The way these people interact is funny and bizarre and touching in a very human way. The performances feel right, even when the characters are notably odd. July herself, as an actor, has a vaguely otherworldly presence, rather like Catherine Keener’s, though July presents more vulnerability. You might say the whole film is about vulnerability.
The actors playing the youngsters, in particular Brandon Ratcliff as Richard’s six-year-old son, are superb and bring something special to the film: if their lives are as yet unformed, are still in process, an ongoing and sometimes scary voyage of discovery, then so are the lives of the adults. These characters don’t have ‘arcs”, as Hollywood likes to call character development. They have zigzags and detours and Sbends, and Me and You and Everyone We Know is all the better for it.