New Releases: Me and You and Everyone We Know

Last weekend, Cinematical writer Kat Parr and I had a conversation over the phone about Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, which we recorded for the purpose of posting as a podcast. I’d seen the film and Kat hadn’t, so the discussion almost took the form of an interview, with her as the eager, hopeful fan questioning me, the jaded authority on the subject. But listening back to the recording, I felt like we weren’t really able to nail the meat of the thing, and now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m actually not sure this is the kind of film that two people can really talk about in any kind of productive way.

The problem is, Miranda July has made a film that really seems to be asking for an open-armed, unqualified embrace. And while I think it’s a very good film and a very original film and a very interesting film, I don’t (and can’t) love it unconditionally. The more I think about it, the more my relationship to Me and You  and Everyone We Know feels like a love affair that never quite happened; there was a spark there, but me and her (because if films are gendered, this one is definitely a girl) have now come to that sort of bittersweet point where it’s clear that we’re not right for each other. And all I can do is give her a kind of awkward hug and let her off into the world. Except, in this case, because she’s a movie and not a girl, instead of an awkward hug I’m going to proceed to give her a conflicted review.



Me and You tracks Christine, an elder cab driver/struggling performance artist, who accidentally falls in love with Richard (John Hawkes), a shoe salesman and single father who’s not really in a stable enough place to love her back. Their almost-romance sprawls across a pastel-drab Los Angeles full of optimistically titled apartment complexes, involving an extended band of neighbors, kids and local weirdoes in the process.

Those of us who knew of Miranda July at all before Me and You made its Sundance splash knew her as a video and performance artist, and Me and You clearly bears the marks of its maker’s prior career. Structurally, each scene seems to represent a contained idea, and could function as its own single-channel installation. This is a polite way of referencing the fact that instead of a narrative, Me and You rests on a backbone of one-liners. I really don’t mean that pejoratively – when a one-liner is good, there’s nothing better.

With painting mired in hipster detachment so ironic as to verge on nihilistic, video-making has evolved into perhaps the one realm of contemporary art where it’s not only totally cool to plumb the personal, its really expected, and July’s art pieces, even when concerned with formal issues, have always born the sweat and fingerprints of the artist herself. Me and You is no exception – not only does the life of heroine Christine bear an uncanny resemblance to the real life of July (who plays her), but the whole film seems to be art directed around, and in the spirit of, July herself.

She’s an arresting presence, with her Dove-white skin, lanky, rainbow-vintage-clad frame, Groucho Marx hair and tight-lipped raspberry mouth. And in the center of her head glow these giant, deep-set, translucent sapphire eyes; when the camera moves in for a close-up, it’s like we’re getting a present just for looking. It’s hard to think of a shot in the film that doesn’t, in that way, bear resemblance to Miranda July herself.

Yes, it’s an immensely pleasurable film to watch, and it rewards over and over again on a purely visual level. But there’s a birthday cake aspect to the whole thing: it’s lovely to look at and yummy to eat, but at some point it starts to cloy, The rule with birthday cake, I think, is that you have to serve it with coffee – and the darker the coffee, the better. That’s where Miranda July and I seem to fatally part ways. She doesn’t seem to have any interest in cutting the sweetness: even the self-consciously “dark” elements of the film are carried off with a kind of lower-lip-biting whimsy that I just find a little too precious. At its peak point of preciosity, Me and You and Everyone We Know starts to feel like a girl that you could look at for the rest of your life – but then you start to wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into when she opens her mouth and pink frosting starts spilling out.

This is vintage, first-indie-film territory; what seems truly original about July’s film is that she knows that it’s overly precious, and she simply does not care. In fact, she pushes the quirk factor to its absolute limit, as if to put her thesis concepts of community and connection to the ultimate test. It’s a film that wants to be loved, and it isn’t afraid to beg. That takes balls.

One thing I want to devote some ink to, partially because it seems like the one aspect of the film that no one has really mentioned, is that fact that Me and You and Everyone We Know is a brutally funny film. Entire setpieces are designed around the anticipation of punchlines that revel in low-blow vulgarity. There were actually moments where I was laughing so hard that I started crying. It’s almost indescribably refreshing to watch a self-consciously highbrow film traffic in low-brow, gross out humor. Going to the art house doesn’t have to be a chore, you know. It, in fact, shouldn’t be. So I might have my reservations about Me and You and Everyone We Know on the whole, but trust me – it’s worth seeing for the poop jokes alone.