You Me and Everyone We Know Movie
Released in 2005, Miranda July'south debut feature saw how the utopian promise of social media would reveal how scared of intimacy we are.
Miranda July'due south "Me and You lot and Everyone Nosotros Know" premiered at Sundance in late January 2005, a few short weeks before YouTube went live on Valentine's Solar day the following month. MySpace was in its infancy, Twitter hadn't fifty-fifty been conceived, and Facebook was all the same new enough that near people simply used information technology to "poke" strangers they didn't have the backbone to wave at in class.
While Paul Haggis' "Crash" typified the kind of movies people were making virtually modern dislocation (read: self-absolving security blankets that wanted you to think a niggling irony would exist enough to erase club's oldest stains), Miranda July's first feature poked its head into arthouse theaters with the prognosis to a problem that near of us hadn't been able to put a finger on yet. July'southward debut feature wasn't the first pic nigh the internet (a sub-genre that had by that signal already run the gamut from "World on a Wire" to "Hackers"), but information technology may have been the starting time to recognize how we'd express ourselves through it, and how the utopian promise of "social media" would so manifestly reveal how scared nosotros are of getting close to each other.
It's the delicate merely well-honed work of an outsider creative person who'd always been attuned to the nature of mod boundaries; a dream-pop kaleidoscope that offers a raw, patchy, and unapologetically perverted wait at the need for intimacy in an interconnected world. The engineering of the last 10 years has transformed how nosotros talk about these things, but "Me and You and Everyone Nosotros Know" remains so lucid and relevant precisely because information technology doesn't have to sift through all of the irony and Silicon Valley shorthand that's distorted how far removed from each other we often tend to feel.
July — who has since invented her own, very on-make social media app — plays Christine Jesperson, an open up-hearted bedroom artist (and part-time "ElderCab" driver) whose multimedia projects ache with the kind of vulnerability that might frighten people in public. Christine is introduced in media res equally she puts the finishing touches on her latest video project, a archaic internet meme of sorts where she dubs her vocalization over a serial of still photographs in a way that endows them with an immediacy that life near never lets us feel in the moment.
Meanwhile, local shoe salesman Richard Swersey (John Hawkes) watches in silence as his wife finalizes their separation. He stares at a bird that sits on a branch outside his (ex) living room window, and wonders how something that close could nevertheless be then inaccessible. Or maybe he's thinking about how shop policy prohibits him from touching a shopper'due south feet, even if they inquire or need his assist. He'd confide in his sons, but they're young and busy making a bengal tiger out of ASCII art on their calculator. Richard is ready for astonishing things to happen, but every role of his world seems just out of reach. He runs onto the lawn and lights his arm on fire while his kids sentry him self-immolate from inside. "It's life," Christine whispers in a disembodied husk. "And information technology's happening. It'south really, really happening. Right now."
Only most of the people in Christine'southward Los Angeles neighborhood — the kind of vacant, unexamined identify that backdrops all of July's best work — are oft too afraid to own upwards to the urgency of all that, and then they settle for a secondhand version of the lives they want. As the film goes on and its tight mosaic of characters flitter around each other, July mines some awkward comic gold out of how people struggle to ask for the love they need. Everyone is available to each other in a mode that the internet was just starting to make obvious at the time, but digital tools are already casting harsh relief on the distancing mechanism that people use to keep themselves from getting injure by their own desires — on a world in which people can share the most intimate of experiences with a perfect stranger, and still not even be able to chance making direct contact with someone standing right in forepart of them.
One indelible scene in the motion picture'south opening minutes cuts to the center of July's business. Christine is driving a sugariness ElderCab customer named Michael (Hector Elias) along the highway when they notice that a lilliputian girl has left her goldfish in a plastic bag on top of her dad'due south moving car the next lane over. The fish is just a few short feet away from Christine, and still she'southward powerless to save information technology. When the oblivious commuter is cut off, the fish launches forwards off his roof and lands on the trunk of the motorcar in front of him, which prompts Christine to pull ahead of that car so she tin can control the speed of the fish car behind her.
"Me and You and Anybody Nosotros Know"
"The all-time thing for that fish would be if he could just bulldoze steadily forever," Michael says every bit the goldfish slides backwards onto the highway. Christine is horrified that the little girl now has a front-row seat to picket her pet get splattered all over the pavement, but her septuagenarian passenger takes it in stride: "At least nosotros're all in this together." No filmmaker this side of Abbas Kiarostami has so tenderly explored the unique way in which cars allow people to occupy private bubbles in public spaces.
On a more literal and hilarious note, Richard's estimator-savvy sons have a lot of fun messing with a (non then) random woman on the cyberspace. When xiv-year-old Oeter (Miles Thompson) starts IM-ing about sex stuff with a stranger his six-year-old brother Robby (Brandon Ratcliff in a legendary Jonathan-Chang-in-"Yi Yi"-level child performance) begins offer some inspired suggestions for dirty talk. The subplot builds to a sweet-natured sight gag so skillful that the director of the IFC Eye had to reprimand people in the audience for laughing too hard during the movie's initial run.
This whole thread of the story is seen through a child's-eye-view of sexuality in a way that might no longer seem permissible, and it's non the simply function of the film to explore that squidgy territory. Some other thread follows 2 precocious teen girls (Natasha Slayton and Najarra Townsend) every bit they play a queasy game of chicken with Richard'southward middle-anile co-worker (Brad William Henke), who starts leaving tweet-length signs in his window that describe what he wants to practice to them.
July'due south staunch refusal to pass judgment on any of these people allows these scenes to cleave closer to Agnès Varda'due south "Le Petit Amour" than Todd Solondz'south "Happiness." With the kind of text-based commutation that men accept used to terrorize women and girls on the cyberspace since the solar day the modem was invented, this unthreatening ballet of shame and want becomes a total-diddled spectacle that passersby simply pretend to ignore. Fifty-fifty the subplot's nigh prurient moments lack even a whiff of exploitation, every bit the film's overpowering focus is on the more than general interplay between openness and vulnerability — a timeless balancing act that July extrapolates into the fundamental dynamic of the digital age.
"Me and Yous and Anybody We Know"
"Me and You and Everyone We Know" is at its most humane and affecting when it keys into the little means that we put walls between us, and how those walls are only getting easier to hide behind and harder to knock down. This is a motion-picture show in which two (or iii) strangers anonymously fantasize about passing a log of poop back and along betwixt their butts forever, just kids can't make modest talk with their own father, and honey can simply be only expressed through a pair of shoes or an electronic Authentication bill of fare that does all of the emotional heavy lifting for yous.
Hypotheticals are intoxicating, only reality is a clear and present danger. Christine and Richard strike upwards a conversation in a meet-beautiful that's shot similar a scene in "Before Dusk," and walks with them as they imagine a hereafter together; they part on practiced terms, simply when Christine loops back around to inquire Richard for a ride, the whole thing is but too possible for him to take. This same crisis is refracted through an even harsher and more than skewering low-cal when Christine submits her video art to curator Nancy Harrington (the late, great Tracy Wright) — or tries to. Record in mitt, Christine ambushes Nancy at the contemporary art museum where she's assembling a show called WARM: 3-D and Touch in the Digital Age, but for Nancy to insist that Christine submit her work via the mail. "But I'thou and then close…" Christine whimpers. The sequence ends with a perfect little push button when Christine accidentally drops the video at Nancy'southward feet, merely for the curator's banana to pick it up and paw information technology dorsum to the artist.
Christine has to find a way to get through to someone who's and then afraid of interpolating real life into her worldview that she merely feels condom to engage with the globe through her own professional detachment. At one point, Nancy sees a burger wrapper on the floor of her gallery, and we laugh considering she assumes information technology's role of the showroom — the joke, information technology turns out, is on us. Her clenched fear isn't foreign to u.s.a..
It's a fright that drives her want to seek connection online, and fear that keeps her from engaging with the doe-eyed girl who shows upwardly to her museum with a dream in her hands. Nancy isn't afraid of other people so much as opening herself up to a world where there's so much dearest for the taking. We're all afraid of how vulnerable we are when we reach for it. Ultimately, Christine tin can simply go through to Nancy past recording a directly, personalized, ultra-intimate plea to the gatekeeper at the end of her video art.
"Could this take been made in any era," Nancy asks her assistant nigh another piece, "or but at present? What does it tell us about digital civilization?" It's an indication of the way the picture show is both epochal and timeless, a far weep from the kind of cautionary movies made nigh the internet that people in subsequent years. "Me and You and Everyone We Know" tells u.s. that — as Richard says — "your whole life could be better starting right now." Information technology'south but difficult to see that sometimes. Just at least nosotros know. We're all in this together.
"Me and You and Anybody We Know" is streaming on the Benchmark Channel and IFC Unlimited.
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Source: https://www.indiewire.com/2020/07/watch-you-and-me-and-everyone-we-know-criterion-channel-stream-of-the-day-1234572567/
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