“I wasn’t done waiting for them, just let me wait forever knowing they will one day come”
What happens when you take two seemingly happy people and decide to place a massive amount of importance on an event soon to happen therefore making them radically change their lifestyle over the near future? You get one of the most unexplained, and at times science bending, dramas to be released in the last… ok that’s where I’ll end the hyperbole.
Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), a couple for a few years now, are living life like you’d imagine anyone else would. They work crappy jobs and have only their own company to remind themselves as to what is really good in the world. They decide that they’re going to adopt a soon to die kitten and they will become it’s caregivers in a month’s time. Somehow Sophie and Jason translate this event into the end of their happy time wasting life as they know it and must therefore change everything about how they live their lives for the next four weeks.
This decision eventually leads down a painful path of little realization, but at the same time a lot of odd occurrences which can only be explained as being what they are. Do I believe that these two were unhappy? No. Do I believe that if they weren’t fuelled by this oddity that made them not only change their lives dramatically but also believe that adopting a cat (that they claim is only going to be alive for six months) they would still be together enjoying their time together at the end of the film? Yes. Does this help the film’s case? Not necessarily.
What I enjoy about films of this genre is not necessarily the film’s end point but rather all those moments between its commencement and final point. We get to see Jason and Sophie playing this game where Jason believes he can stop time with his mind, which comes back later in the film in one of the year’s most effective and outstanding scenes of the year; we also get to see Sophie trying to do her own dance videos and just continually being awkward about it and never getting through the first one and many other nice dramatic moments.
What will really make this film memorable is the time and space bending scene with Jason in the middle of the night. It’s a scene that is based on the idea of a lack of wish for time to continue. In every failed relationship we all have this moment. We recognize what’s about to happen and we know that it’s just one moment away from finally going in the completely opposite direction that we had ever hoped for it to go and all we want is for that moment not to happen. So instead of dealing with that moment we freeze time to the moment just before, when things are still good. You and she are, supposedly, still happy and nothing else really matters.
I will say however, as much as I liked this movie I did find certain elements confusing. I didn’t get the role of Paw Paw, the cat they plan to adopt that we get to hear monologues from throughout the film. In most films that do that they have the thoughts of that outside character mimic what’s happening with our protagonist(s). So was Sophie represented by Paw Paw? Was she the one who was always outside and never loved in the first place? I don’t think so, but I’m sure that the cat was supposed to mean something.