When the so-far lackluster 2011 Sundance Film Festival line-up was announced earlier this month, several pictures we expected to land at the festival were missing, but topping the list was Miranda July‘s upcoming “The Future.”
Her long awaited follow-up to 2005’s “Me and You and Everyone We Know” — a divisive film, but one that we listed in our Best Films of 2005 — has had the distribution rights recently picked up by Match Factory. Titled “The Future” (and formerly titled “Satisfaction” for those keeping score) it’s a surreal relationship drama that seemed like a perfect fit for the festivities at Park City, but its exclusion from Sundance was a head scratcher. Well, it turns out that’s resolved, the film will premiere in Utah and some new photos have arrived too (a first look was revealed earlier this year).
Apart from starring July (naturally), it also stars Hamish Linklater (“Fantastic Four”). We read the script months and months ago and the film is pretty much about a 30-something couple in distress, or at least slowly unraveling, due to their own capricious wanderings and self-involved inclinations. We gave that script a pretty harsh thumbs down, however we did note that it was an early-ish draft, and more to the point, July’s films are all about those emotive and ineffable atmospheric elements that are hard to translate onto the page. We still had a lot of hope as she’s an inventive filmmaker and her debut employed a dreamy and naive optimism that most of us adored.
Here’s the synopsis we wrote at the time (with some mild modifications from this writer to drop some of the spoilers).
Sophie (July) and Jason (Linklater), a 30-something couple, live together in their happy, dreamy, hipster-like and poetic world. One day when wandering in a Crafts Bazaar, they buy the portrait of a little girl made by her own father. For reasons almost beyond her own comprehension Sophie begins to stalk and follow the man, polar opposite to her taste, and the deeper her involvement becomes, the more her and Jason’s lives are turned upside down.
Interestingly enough, most of the additional casting information is on IMDB and seems to have slipped in without anyone noticing. Character actor David Warshofsky (“Public Enemies,” “Fair Game“) plays the father named Marshall and Isabella Acres plays his daughter, and that pretty much sums up the majority of the cast. There must have been some delays in the schedule as Edward Lachman was set to do the cinematography (he lensed her debut and several Todd Haynes films including the sumptuous “Far From Heaven” and “I’m Not There“) but IMDB lists Nikolai vonGraevenitz as the DP. Of course there’s no music score credit yet , but we would simply die if it was Michael Andrews again.
“We haunt ourselves, Googling our own name, perpetually clicking on search,” July told IndieWire about the story and its characters earlier this year. “Because if we’re always searching then we never have to notice that we’ve found it, we’re there, this is really it.”
[IonCinema]
