将来

Emanated from a piece of performance art, US indie scenester and filmmaker Miranda July’s sophomoric feature THE FUTURE (her third one KAJILIONAIRE would arrive 9 years later in 2020) adopts a cosmic conceit of warped time to dissect a quotidian relationship in disengagement, but once that move is done, July fails to conjure up anything even remotely droll or profound like her flash-in-the-pan debut ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (2005).

An L.A.-dwelling, mid-30s couple Sophie and Jason (July and Linklater), decide to adopt an injured stray cat, it takes one month before the cat can be fully recuperated and assigned to their care. So during the holding pattern, emboldened by the pending new perspective (the cat is obvious a dry run of a baby, and the film is concatenated through a warped feline voiceover, as if it were a stillborn narrating its own sad destiny), they both quit their routine jobs (she is a children’s dance teacher and he is a tech support), and embrace something more meaningful or challenging, to prepare entering another phase of life that means a point of no return to hem, but that preparedness becomes ever so elusive and a disillusioned Sophie begins an affair with an elder widower Marshall (Warshofsky).

The time-warping part is fantasticated right before Sophie’s intending confession as Jason refuses her to do so by squarely stopping the time, and in a paralleled universe, Sophie vividly experiences her new bourgeois life with Marshall, until she is jolted back to her past by the presence of “shirty”, her favorite mustard t-shirt now becomes an ambulatory costume and creepily slithers into her bedroom.

After Jason sets the time back to normal (thanks to the instruction with a talkative moon), Sophie returns to their apartment, what awaits them is either a reconciliation or a final goodbye.

The signs of their 4-year co-dependency’s unraveling are shown earlier on where familiarity is normalized and ossifies their co-habitation (Jason can’t be arsed to get up and fetch a glass of water to Sophie, small gesture always divulges deep fissure underneath), and the temporal trick is tacitly previewed as a mischief that presages the later sea change.

All quirks but no sparks, THE FUTURE is middle-of-the-road among fringe filmmaking, an innovative brainwave could rarely be expanded into a feature-length corker without proper appurtenances, July’s fey spirit continues, but THE FUTURE is half-baked and fizzles out with a whimper.

referential entries: July’s ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (2005, 8.6/10); Noah Baumbach’s FRANCES HA (2012, 6.6/10).