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An artistic eye wonders

By A. O. Scott
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Friday, Dec 09, 2005, Page 16

Me and You and Everyone We Know is conceptual artists Miranda July's first feature-length film. Her artistic background shines through the movie by mixing the sensibilities of installation art with the conventions of cinema. PHOTOS COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES

Me and You and Everyone We Know, winner of prizes in Cannes and at Sundance, is Miranda July's first feature film, and its wide-eyed, quizzical approach to the world can seem almost naive. But this guilelessness -- which will either charm you or drive you up the wall -- is more a calculated effect than the simple expression of a whimsical sensibility.

Before turning to film, July was a conceptual artist (working in video and other media), a pursuit that demands dogged self-confidence, as well as a willingness to look at even the most trivial objects and events as potential material for aesthetic transformation. Though her movie has a clear narrative line, and might even be classified as romantic comedy, it is also a meticulously constructed visual artifact, diffidently introducing the playful, rebus-like qualities of installation art to the conventions of narrative cinema.

It is a meeting as tentative, and in the end as affecting, as the wistful, start-and-stop romance pursued by a conceptual artist named Christine (July) and a shoe salesman named Richard (John Hawkes).

Richard, newly separated from his wife, has occasional custody of his two sons, who regard their father with a mixture of curiosity and alarm, as if he were a new arrival from outer space or an escapee from the insane asylum. To be fair, he does seem a little unbalanced: one of his first actions in the film is to light one of his hands on fire, which he thinks the boys will understand as a ritual gesture consecrating the end of his marriage rather than as evidence of their mother's good sense in wanting him out of the house.

Meanwhile, Christine is preparing a videotape portfolio of her work and supporting herself by chauffeuring elderly citizens on their daily errands. She and Richard are nodal points in a web of odd, lost souls who slowly, by the film's end, form a sympathetic, eccentric circle. True to her movie's title, July proposes a delicate, beguiling idea of community and advances it in full awareness of the peculiar obstacles that modern life presents.

Film Notes: Me and You and Everyone We Know Directed by: Miranda July Starring: John Hawkes (Richard Swersey), Miranda July (Christine Jesperson), Miles Thompson (Peter Swersey), Brandon Ratcliff (Robby Swersey), Carlie Westerman (Sylvie), Hector Elias (Michael) Running time: 91 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

One of these is the tendency of city dwellers -- the movie takes place mainly in the flat, drab inland neighborhoods of Los Angeles -- to live hermetically sealed inside their own minds and habits. Individuality itself makes communication difficult, but the drive to be yourself does not dispel the longing to find (and maybe also to become) somebody else.

This longing is addressed in various ways, some of them touching, some funny, some borderline creepy. Richard's younger son, Robby (the adorable Brandon Ratcliff), who is six, wanders into an Internet romance in which his childishness is taken for a daring and sophisticated sexual kink. His older brother, Peter (Miles Thompson), a bored-looking adolescent, is first teased and then sexually initiated by two girls who hang around the neighborhood carrying on a risky flirtation with Richard's co-worker, who posts salacious notes in the window of his apartment.

Peter's affections, however, seem to be stirred by his younger neighbor Sylvie (Carlie Westerman), who is determinedly -- you might say obsessive-compulsively -- collecting linens and household appliances for her trousseau.

July observes the odd behavior of all these people, and records her own, with a warm collector's eye.

Me, You and Everyone We Know is resolutely small-scaled and observational, picking out odd details and savoring tiny jokes. But it also carries a surprisingly strong emotional undercurrent. Hawke's thin, crooked face and worried blue eyes register just how lost Richard has become, and Christine, who at first seems both appealingly nerdy and a little passive-aggressive, shares with July a deftly camouflaged determination to get what she wants.

In the character's case, this is love and a measure of recognition; in the filmmaker's case, well, perhaps the same. Everyone we know may not respond to her flirtation, which manages to be both brazen and coy. Her provocations may strike some people as overly cute and her self-consciousness as a tiresome form of solipsism. But Me and You and Everyone We Know is brave enough to risk this rejection, and generous enough not to deserve it. I like it very much and I hope you will, too.
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