Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005): B

On the basis of Me and You and Everyone We Know, precious eccentricity seems to be Miranda July’s filmmaking signature. And though such a delicate mood of weird, bemused cuteness can border on the infuriating, July’s debut feature film (which she wrote and directed after years as a celebrated conceptual artist) generally maintains a lovely humanism while ambling along its peculiar, providence-laced path. When not artistically videotaping still postcards and layering them with romantic “dialogue,” Christine (July) works for a taxi service driving elderly people around town. Richard (Deadwood’s John Hawkes) is a recently divorced shoe salesman who attempts to save his marriage (or, perhaps, to consecrate the union’s end) by lighting his hand on fire on the front lawn, an act that only further alienates him from sons Peter (Miles Thompson) and Robby (Brandon Ratcliff). Peter gets his first taste of sex through a fellatio contest between two girls (Natasha Slayton and Najarra Townsend) while striking up a friendship with a precocious neighbor (Carlie Westerman) who’s preparing a dowry for her eventual marriage, while young Robby begins a dialogue in an online chat room with a pervert who mistakes the kid’s immature comments about going to the bathroom as “dirty talk.” What all of these disparate, oddball characters have in common is a yearning for human connection and a desperate need for self-actualization, both of which are obtained by assuming certain societal/relationship roles (one might call the process “acting”). July’s own performance, unfortunately, can be annoyingly artificial. But her film’s idiosyncratic, poetic aesthetic nonetheless gives Christine and Richard’s awkward courtship a magical sweetness that, more often than not, overwhelms Me and You and Everyone We Know’s occasionally affected quirkiness.