Title: The Future

Opens: July 29, 2011

When Sophie (Miranda July) runs into someone she knows who is pregnant, she asks the woman how she feels. “It’s a drag,” replies the woman, “but it’s amazing.” That bit of dialogue may or may not be the key to Miranda July’s vision in her second film, one that might be pondered long after its conclusion to weigh a multiplicity of interpretations. “The Future” is likely to be the quirkiest movie this year, not unexpected since Ms. July’s freshman entry, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” dealt with two characters who walk down the street. She suggests that the block they are walking down is their lives. When they are halfway down and halfway through their lives, they realize that before long they will be at the end. To say that “The Future” is like no other film, then, is not correct as it bears similarity to July’s first film.

Though “The Future” opens up to a small cast of characters who provide links to the duo’s lives, this movie is essentially a two-character photographed play. The two, Sophie and her boyfriend, Jason (Hamish Linklater), are in their mid-thirties. They look alike with their curly hair. They talk alike. They appear a couple made in heaven who probably should have continued as they are-she a dance teacher to small children, he a computer techie working from home. But something’s missing. To fill the gap they agree to adopt a sick cat, Paw Paw, whose voice is provided by Ms. July and whose desire to go to a loving home after its thirty days in the clinic is poignant. Since this is their last month of freedom-they must devote full time to a commitment to their new pet-they shut down their internet connection, quit their jobs, and dream about what they want to do. Sophie opts to dance daily, Jason to sell subscriptions to trees that could save the planet. Inexplicably, Sophie stops her creative dances, dons conservative clothing, and heads to an L.A. suburb where she conducts an affair with Marshall (David Warshofsky), an arrow-straight resident bringing up a small daughter. Jason, suspecting the worst, literally stops time in a moment of magic realism to heal Sophie, to bring her back.

I almost dread passing on my interpretation as simply one of mid-life crisis in which two people who seem to be smack on each other’s wavelength pause to consider whether they should continue drifting in jobs they don’t like, part-timing their way through life as though on remote year after year until-as Jason says-40 is like 50 and everything after 50 is small change. It’s difficult to see why Sophie pursues an affair with a bourgeois suburbanite who, strangely enough, appears to like this fragile creature so unlike himself. Jason remains unwilling to let her go, doing his best to cover over Sophie’s self-doubt but finding the task impossible. Interpretations aside, however, the film is static, the conversations taking place sotto voce as though daring the audience to hang on every word. Miranda July appears to follow in Woody Allen’s footsteps albeit without that filmmaker’s self-deprecatory humor and grounding in reality. Because the movie eschews a Hollywood ending, some may find it more authentic, but for me this is a work to be respected for unique qualities rather than happily enjoyed.

Unrated. 91 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: New York Film Critics Online

Story: B-

Overall: B-