Miranda July is a multidisciplinary artist known mostly for her quirky movies.
I can declare that she is the queen of the post-meet-cute scene. The meet-cute is the scene when our protagonist couple see each other for the first time. On the next minutes, they confirm the meeting and the future with a follow up. In "Me and You..." a stretch of street represents a life-long relationship which the characters traverse sharing years with each step. In "Kajillionaire" the entire last third of the movie works as a date culminating in the sight of a cash register panel, posited between the two, signaling forever freedom. It is all very enchanting. In both cases, the notion of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) saving somebody with her strange manners and aloofness is rapidly dispelled. July's movies don't have a Zooey Deschanel arquetype. Despite the surrounding weirdness, characters respond like adults would in real life.
Now, it would be easy to accuse July of being a simple indie hipster, but there are indications that she has grown as an artist and does not belong with the nihilist retro consumerism of gentrified Brooklyn. In her first movie July packs multiple themes intercalated in a short runtime, as if it was the only chance she would had as a filmmaker. However, "Kajillionaire" shows a mature director that can sustain interest by focusing on romance and family.
"Me and You" lives entirely in the period between the birth of the popular Internet and the kingdom of smartphones, social media and Tinder, namely 2005. Digital art and the digital world are included as one of the main themes, both in the plots of July trying to make it as an artist (including criticism of the art scene) and young children arranging an online date with an adult through outrageous messages in a desktop computer messaging application. A Boomer side character tells Julie to just take what it's hers, in this case the possibility of an exhibition in the local art museum. In "Kajillionaire" angst again this kind of Boomer delusion is expanded into the main problematic of the movie.
Two more things to add: July creates astounding tension out of thin air, in sequences that belong to a thriller but whose stakes are definitively small. In "You and Me..." a father forgets a bag with her daughter's fish in the top of his car, and then drives. We are all witness to the impending disaster. Tension soars. In "Kajillionaire" the formal plot centers on a family of small-time crooks, thus it is part of the normal narrrative of heist films.
And finally, sexuality. The unconventional pairings of "You and me... " include a child and an adult woman, a sexual scene between an early adolescence boy and two developed late adolescence girls, those girls and a young adult man, and the often hidden coupling between two old people in the last years of their lives. Nowadays some of those pairings would put Julie into the league of provocateurs such as Greg Arraki, Gaspar Noé or Todd Solondz. Seems that 2005 is so close but so far away.
"Me and You and Everyone We Know" - Recommended.
"Kajillionaire" - Recommended.
