Well, well, well. It’s about time. We’ve been waiting for Miranda July’s new film for about five years now — pretty much ever since she debuted with, “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” a divisive picture to be sure (too twee and precious for some), but one that we listed in our Best Films of 2005 retrospective feature (don’t call us crazy, it won the Cannes’ Camera d’Or in ’05).
Her new project at one point was called, “Satisfaction,” then reverted to an untitled state and now, according to IndieWire has a final title in “The Future.”
MK2 and Britain’s Film4 produced the picture and while it was cast in March of 2009 and then was supposed to shoot in the late summer of 2009, if that timetable indeed stuck it was remarkably off-the-radar.
Either way, we shouldn’t nitpick, the picture has actually completed shooting and that’s really the first news we’ve heard about it since last year. Apart from starring July (naturally), the picture also stars Hamish Linklater (“Fantastic Four”).
The film is pretty much about a 30-something couple in distress, or at least slowly unraveling, due to their own capricious wanderings and self-involved inclinations. We read the script last year and gave it a pretty harsh thumbs down, however we did note that it was an early-ish draft, and more to the point, July’s films are all about those emotive and ineffable atmospheric moments that are hard to translate onto the page. We still had a lot of hope as she’s an inventive filmmaker and her debut employed a dreamy and naive optimism that most of us adored.
Here’s the synopsis we wrote at the time (with some mild modifications from this writer to drop some of the spoilers).
Sophie (July) and Jason (Linklater), a 30-something couple, live together in their happy, dreamy, hipster-like and poetic world. One day when wandering in a Crafts Bazaar, they buy the portrait of a little girl made by her own father. For reasons almost beyond her own comprehension Sophie begins to stalk and follow the man, polar opposite to her taste, and the deeper her involvement becomes, the more her and Jason’s lives are turned upside down.
Interestingly enough, most of the additional casting information is on IMDB and seems to have slipped in without anyone noticing. Character actor David Warshofsky (“Public Enemies,” “Fair Game”) plays the father named Marshall and Isabella Acres plays his daughter, and that pretty much sums up the majority of the cast. There must have been some delays in the schedule as Edward Lachman was set to do the cinematography (he lensed her debut and several Todd Haynes films including the sumptuous “Far From Heaven” and “I’m Not There”) but IMDB lists Nikolai von Graevenitz as the DP. Of course there’s no music score credit yet , but we would simply die if it was Michael Andrews again.
“We haunt ourselves, Googling our own name, perpetually clicking on search,” July told IndieWire about the story and its characters. “Because if we’re always searching then we never have to notice that we’ve found it, we’re there, this is really it.”
The film has been acquired for distribution in the U.S. by the Match Factory, but there’s no word on a release date yet.