Me And You And Everyone We Know

If ever proof were needed of the mental instability of film festival juries, Miranda July's irritating directorial debut Me And You And Everyone We Know has so far grabbed no fewer than seven awards - four of them at Cannes alone. This will come as no surprise to those of you who passed out from boredom watching last year's Sundance fave Napoleon Dynamite; but Me And You is not only tedious, it's one of the most distasteful films I have seen this year.

Set in a featureless LA suburb, the film fields characters who circle each other as gingerly as horny porcupines. Richard (John Hawkes) is a neurotic shoe salesman whose sensible wife has thrown him out. Christine (July herself) is an aspiring artist who supports herself by chauffeuring the elderly around town. Both are borderline crazy - he sets fire to his hand to symbolise his dead marriage, she chants prayers for a doomed goldfish - so it's no surprise when Christine begins to stalk Richard from the fringes of the shoe department with athletic socks dangling from her ears. She's in love, you see.

In its coy, quirky and, occasionally, creepy way, Me And You presents a world where adults are less sexually active - and considerably less mature - than their children. In one scene, a passive 14-year-old boy is calmly fellated by a pair of precocious 16-year-old girls, who then ask him to rate their respective performances. For added amusement, the girls act provocatively in front of Richard's co-worker (Brad Henke), who then telegraphs his transgressive fantasies via Post-It notes stuck to his front window. Pushing whimsy to unsettling lengths, a lengthy sequence features a seven-year-old boy composing explicitly scatological emails in an internet chat room - then arranging to meet their aroused recipient.

Bracing as it is to experience honest, unfiltered sexual dialogue, these scenes are jarringly at odds with the movie's generally lighthearted tone. On the surface we have Christine's doe-eyed innocence, underneath is July's sourly twisted notion of human longing. The main theme here seems to be that adults long for intimacy while children need sensation - a point that could have been made without the sledgehammer. Or the socks on the ears.