Me and You and Everyone We Know
Or
Samaritan Girl
Miranda July’s account of the inspiration for Me and You and Everyone We Know gives an indication of her wistful comedy’s strengths and limitations. “This movie was inspired by the longing I carried around as a child, longing for the future, for someone to find me, for magic to descend upon my life and transform everything,” she writes in the press packet. “It was also informed by how this longing progressed as I became an adult, slightly more fearful, more contorted, but no less fantastically hopeful.”
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July’s main characters, all kids at heart, are a lonely video artist and driver for the elderly (July), a shoe salesman (John Hawkes) recently separated from his wife, and his two sons, ages 7 (Brandon Ratcliff) and 14 (Miles Thompson). The secondary characters include the shoe salesman’s male coworker, a couple of teenage girls, a ten-year-old girl, and a woman who curates at a local art museum. These characters are touching and sympathetic to the extent that they’re lonely, and that’s what most of them are most of the time. The teenage girls, who have each other, are basically viewed as heartless; the same applies to the ten-year-old girl when she’s briefly seen hanging out with other girls. The shoe salesman’s estranged wife, who has a lover, isn’t lonely or childlike–she doesn’t belong to the same world. She also happens to be the only black character, which inflects the isolation of her kids, but one isn’t encouraged to think that her race plays any part in her own separateness.
When in the opening sequence Or collects Ruthie from a hospital and brings her home, it’s apparent that she’s the one in the responsible parental role. Ruthie’s addicted to turning tricks–not so much for the money as for the self-esteem and sense of power she derives from it–and there’s an acute pathos when Or locks her inside their cramped flat before going out to work as a dishwasher. Meanwhile Or’s periodically enjoying some sex of her own with her boyfriend, who lives in the neighborhood. Yet by the film’s end we see she’s well on her way toward becoming a prostitute herself–an outcome that’s made to seem wholly believable, but not explicable in any single or simple way.
Escaping from the cops after turning a trick, Jae-yeong leaps from a high window in her underwear and Yeo-jin carries her to a hospital, where Jae-yeong points to the name and address of the composer in her diary and begs, “Bring him to me–I miss him.” Yeo-jin dutifully looks up the composer, who refuses to come unless Yeo-jin, who’s a virgin, has sex with him first. By the time they arrive at the hospital, Jae-yeong is already dead, a blissful smile on her lips.
