The Future

This is inevitable. It happens to me every year, during the last few days of December. As I ponder over what I did last year, I am invaded by a sense of lack. I did not do enough, and my life has just passed by me. This happens every year.

This time around, this feeling was aggravated by Miranda July’s new film ‘The Future.’ The film tells the story of a couple, in their late 30s, filled with a sense of ennui, who suddenly realise that their time is already passing away, and soon they’d be old, and they haven’t done enough in their lives and they got to do something about it.

They decide to adopt a cat. This particular cat, however, has a broken paw, and it will take it at least a month to heal. Now, Sophie and Jason decide that till the cat is theirs, they should live their lives to the optimum and do things they always wanted to do. Jason quits his job and becomes a door-to-door salesman for trees, Sophie also quits her job, and decides to post a dance a day on Youtube for one month.

As you would guess, things do not go according to plan. The cat, Paw Paw, who can talk, after doing some abstract talking about loneliness, dies. Sophie has a fling with a single father, and Jason befriends an old widower, and so on. And oh, time-stopping sub plot, literally, and a conversation with the moon.

As the film ends, they are back to where they had started. Nothing actually changed. Or something did change!

This is the story of my life. Nothing much has changed in the last 10 years or so. This is what I think. But, no, it’s not true. Things have changed. It’s an all together different matter that it did not change according to my plans.

I thank popular American film critic Roger Ebert for introducing me to Miranda July and her wonderful Cannes award-winning first film, ‘You, Me and Everyone We Know (2005)’. That film was something else altogether and I still love that film, and it still instills in me a sense of hope. It’s never too late to fall in love, again. It’s not too late for future as well. Perhaps.

The Future on IMDb.