The Future ruminates on mortality

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      Starring Miranda July and Hamish Linklater. Unrated. Opens Friday, October 28, at the Vancity Theatre

      Like Ewan McGregor’s floundering charmer in Beginners, the young couple found in The Future are semisocialized Southern Californians on the brink of adulthood, or retreat. Miranda July plays a pale, withdrawn dancer named Sophie, and Hamish Linklater (from TV’s The New Adventures of Old Christine) is tall, dishevelled Jason, a low-level phone tech. They’re still figuring out how to pay the bills and talk to each other when the notion of mortality suddenly arrives like an unwanted pizza.

      Childless and working below their potentials (or at least their potential potentials), this frazzled, not-quite-young couple decides to adopt an injured cat. But the animal, dubbed Paw-Paw, must wait a month in quarantine, and she—through the director’s voice—explains what happens during that artificially proscribed interim. If you can’t tolerate movies narrated by animals, perhaps it’s time to stop reading.

      July is the writer and performance artist whose breakthrough film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, tickled many fancies while making other viewers scratch their heads at its naive whimsy. She’s married to Mike Mills, whose Beginners also displays a childlike vision—right down to talking animals—while applying quietly rigorous aesthetics that some folks miss and others find too precious.

      Here, July does the math when two unfinished people get together, and, as it turns out, playing house can pack a surprisingly emotional wallop. Unlike the artist’s previous film, with its sun-drenched mall spaces and odd visual juxtapositions, this strangely exhilarating creation has a deliberately grainy, offhanded look (plus Jon Brion’s tense, minimalistic score) to go with a darker, more melancholy mood. Accordingly, Jason exercises his iffy commitment to environmentalism and his uncanny ability to stop time, while the studiedly asexual Sophie dallies strangely with a clueless Bob Guccione type in the Valley. (By the way, ladies: never go for a suburban dad whose only child digs large holes in the backyard.) I wouldn’t want to live in The Future, but—damn it, I do!


      Watch the trailer for The Future.

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