You certainly wouldn’t need telling that You And Me And Everyone We Know came to our shores via Sundance. With its seemingly endless capacity for navel-gazing and quirkiness (spit), it belongs right down there on a special me-me-me triple bill featuring What The Bleep Do We Know? and My Life Without Me. Indeed, when one character pops up wearing a t-shirt that reads “I am me. I am valued, cherished, adored, unique…” it seems less like at a pithy zinger at the expense of 21st century self-absorption than the movie’s manifesto.
Fortunately there are moments when one can almost understand the appeal of this much feted festival hit. With pleasingly queasy outbreaks of Solondzitis (gesundheit), Ms. July - the writer-director-performance-artist and star - excavates notions of modern loneliness; one narrative strand sees a six year old innocently carry on an explicit cyber-affair, while elsewhere two teenage nymphs attempt to seduce an older pervert. Unhappily, the central romance between a kooky girl artist (unwisely essayed by July herself) and a world-weary shoe salesman (Hawkes, the cut-price Gallo from TV’s Deadwood) is far less engaging. The moment when she attempts to woo him by wearing socks on her ears would alone make You And Me And Everyone We Know odds-on favourite for cringiest viewing of the year.
All in all, it’s everything one might reasonably expect in a movie by a performance artist.