Belltown Messenger

Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, which opened this year's Seattle International Film Festival, was the first opening nighter directed by a woman. It also marked the first time that any director, female or male, had to leave SIFF within 24 hours of their film screening to pick up a prize at Cannes - as happened to July when she returned to France the day after SIFF's opening to receive the CamŽra d'Or award.
Nearly a month later, July still sounded surprised by the honor. "You definitely don't go to Cannes thinking you're going to win," she told me over the phone from New York. "It's just so amazing to get in that festival." Indeed, July adds, "The programmers actually felt they were being quite risky by programming a film with humor." Me and You... has its share of humor, but it's of the off-the-wall variety. It's an ensemble piece about a group of characters ranging in age who each strive to make some kind of a connection with someone. And the fact that they have varying degrees of success tempers the humor with an undercurrent of melancholy.
July agrees, saying, "That longing for connection and that sadness is so 'me'; that longing is what propels me to make work, to make my art. It's aching for this thing that you're trying to find in the world. And the movie itself is my version of the kind of risk that each person in the movie takes to connect."
Though now based in LA, July's name should be familiar to those interested the Northwest's alternative arts scene. The former Portland resident is a multi-faceted performance artist who's also recorded for the Olympia-based Kill Rock Stars label and performed at Seattle venues like the OK Hotel and On The Boards, in addition to her film work. And it was while working on a 27 minute short, Nest of Tens, that July decided she was ready for a bigger challenge; "I sort of thought If I could do this, I could probably make a feature," she says.
In January 2003, July's fledgling script got a further boost when it was accepted in the Sundance Screenwriter's Lab. She not only got to shoot some scenes as "practice runs," she also met Gina Kwon, who became the film's producer. By June of 2004, shooting began, and the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, where it won a special jury prize for "Originality of Vision."
This film's "vision" encompasses Richard (John Hawkes), a shoe salesman and newly single father of two, who encounters Christine (July), a performance artist who pays the bills as the owner of "Eldercab," a driving service. Intersecting their lives are Richard's co-worker, Christine's clients, a gallery curator, Richard's sons, and some precocious teenage girls. The inter-generational make up of the cast is deliberate. "I've always been curious to see different kinds of couples, pairs that you don't often see together in movies," says July. "It doesn't help us, in terms of mixing generations, to constantly see teenagers only with teenagers and never with children who are younger than them, or elderly people all have to be together or just in relationship to their grandchildren."
And though there's a sweetness to many of the encounters, there's also a decided sexual edge that July admits did raise concerns, especially in scenes involving the teenagers - particularly one concerning, to put it bluntly, a side-by-side blowjob comparison. "Before it was greenlit, I had one really specific conversation with the head of the distribution company [IFC Films], where I reassured him that the scene was not going to be a titillating centerpiece of the movie," she says. "And it's really not; the scene even has a kind of sadness to it. And they made me change some lines - it's funny, teenagers can be seen seeming to be doing anything, but they can't say they're going to do it. They can't say, We're going to give you a blowjob.' That's why it's jimmy ha-ha'; I just thought I'd rather have them make up a word and be seen kind of censoring themselves. And the Child Labor Board had various kind of perverse recommendations of their own, like they wanted the girls to giggle more and be more coy. They were very thrown off by how assertive the teenagers are."
And the film's R rating, for "disturbing sexual content involving children," might also give people the wrong idea; a plotline involving a little boy and his exploits with internet chat rooms is certainly bizarre, but hardly "disturbing" in terms of exploitation. Instead, July hopes Me and You... will give the viewer a greater sense of life's potential. "My favorite thing is to see something and feel like something is possible that wasn't possible before," she says, "like a feeling in me, or a conversation with someone, or that I can make something. I just like coming away with a little bit more room in the world, like a new space. And that's what I hope people get out of the film."

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