Me And All We Know And Me Analysis

Review of Me and You and Everyone We Know
Miranda July’s independent movie Me and You and Everyone We Know is very cute and a little bit bizarrely funny, which mainly observes of how modern people struggle to connect with each other in an isolating world. Through the usage of film techniques such color and the camera distances and angles, views get a better understanding of how the central character Christine, a lonely artist who operates a cab service for the elderly, falls in love and holds hands together with a department-store shoe salesman Richard，who is newly separated from his wife and trying to make his apartment feel like home to his sons, Peter and Robby.
The colors used in the movie stand out and effectively help views get a sense of
how the initial tone of the whole movie, which is dull and dumpy, gradually turns to be warm and light. In the beginning of the film, the director makes use of saturated and desaturated color to offset different characters and reinforce the contrast between them. All viewers get a basic idea of Christine, a thoughtful and bright woman, when she is dressed in a red and white T-shirt standing near the collection of her photographs.
"Women in Western cultures who want to emphasize their sexual appeal have long been known to use red to draw attention to themselves"(67, Phillips). However, Richard is introduced by the colors that are totally drained of intensity such as his brown T-shirt and the drab decoration of his living apartment. On the contrary, the outside sky of this apartment is always blue, a cool and calm tone, which tend to be associated with [relaxation]"(68, Phillips). The director strongly enhances Richard’s constraint of life through an apparent color contrast between his apartment and this bright sky. Therefore, views have a better sense of why Richard chooses an irrational method to release all his depression. The eye-level shot of this scene is especially attractive and nervous: Richard ends up lighting his hand on fire, and the warm colors almost occupy the frame. The colors [orange and yellow] [tend] to be thought of as hot, dangerous, lively, and assertive"(67, Phillips), which conveys to views that his strong desire for more attention and communication from his children. The alternately appearance of the deep focus of Christine and Richard
underlines their different characteristics — Christine’s passion and vigor and Richard’s unconfident and rigor. Then, the filmmaker takes an advantage of an expressive color of love, a pair of pink shoes, to connect these two distinct persons. The viewers clearly find that Richard takes off that dark color shirt and wears a yellow one after walking down the block with Christine, which implies that he expects to have a new lifestyle and everything is more energetic than before. While, Christine starts to wear a black blouse after Richard asking her to get out of his car, which not only expresses her sense of sadness, but also emphasizes his fear and confusion of the coming love. Finally, after Richard is saved by "love" from Christine, the final scene of the talk between them outside Richard’s apartment has an apparent light change, two people appear in the final shot with the merging of the different color tones, which somehow means that their relationship renews and they begin to fall in love with each other.
In addition, the good use of camera distances and angles stands out and effectively reveals the varied emotions. Firstly，the director prefers to shot the central characters Christine and Richard by medium shots and medium close-ups in this movie since they can capture and present every subtly change in their mind well. For example, when Richard looks at the bird outside of his home, the bird is shown from a low angle that represents the power of freedom and peace, and a high angle results Richard in the sense of helplessness and envy. In order to reinforce the contrast between these two conditions in life and provoke viewer 's sympathy for Richard, July shots these two scenes individually rather than using a long shot to put these two objects into a frame. In the entire scene, the camera seldom stays far away from Richard and Christine than a long shot, and one excellent scene with the juxtaposition of long shots and eye-level angle happens when they have to be apart from each other at the end of the street. The camera with a zoom lens shots that Christine looks back on Richard’s distant receding figure，illuminating her favorites of this man and foreshadow the later event.
Overall, July’s awesome adaptation of script and various uses of film techniques creates a film fills with awkward but funny characters that are put in everyday life. All the love, confusion and seeking are desperate. The lack of communication and people expressing their emotions is the root of conflicts in this film, so July suggests that people tend to remove those barriers and be positive to express feelings on the way of searching for love.

Work Cited List
Phillips, William H. Film: An Introduction Fourth Edition. Bedford/St. Martin 's, 2009.