Bird of a Feather

Shot in 24 days for around $1 million in Van Nuys, Me and You and Everyone We Know is an assured marriage of literary and visual flair that wouldn't look out of place on the experimental fringe of indie film. Still, it wasn't July's craft that moved audiences at Sundance, or the ecstatic French teens and old men who rushed to pay her homage at Cannes. More likely, it's her articulation of the inner and outer lives of ordinary people in the modern age—doubting Thomases and shrinking violets with few social skills and fewer social frameworks in which to meet, who grope their way toward love or something like it. For all her sudden mainstream success, she sees a cumulative continuity to her work. Though she worries, like all overnight success stories, that she will become a pariah in the fringe art world so hilariously lampooned in Me and You, and that she'll never have quiet time again to work on new projects, July is thrilled to have discovered in herself a common touch. "I'm fighting the intellectualism I came from," she says. "I want to make my world in the world."