DVD review: The Future, (12), (91 mins)

THINK of those beautiful French films so French and beautiful - so insubstantial and so devoid of action – that they simply wouldn’t work in any other language.

The Future is a little reminder of the inevitable disaster of attempting something similar in English.

You could easily imagine it – with a much lighter hand – working quirkily and effectively in French. In English (well, American), it’s a clod-hopping lump of arty claptrap.

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Or maybe the problem is that it’s just impossible to get over the cat who supposedly narrates it. Not that that’s a problem in itself. It’s just that the producers have given the cat the most irritating voice ever heard at any time in any place on film.

The premise is that this is the cat that a childless couple in their 30s are just about to rescue on the basis that the cat is apparently fatally ill and likely to die soon anyway.

But when the vet delivers the double whammy that they can’t have it for 30 days and that it could well live for five years, the next 30 days effectively become the “rest of their lives” for the couple – their remaining slice of freedom before responsibility kicks in.

So they do what any self-respecting pretentious bohemian would do: they quit their jobs and proceed to bore rigid themselves, everyone around them and, worst of all, us at home.

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30 years on, my sister-in-law remains defiantly proud of her religious studies report: “Anna has wasted her time, my time and everybody else’s time.”

The same could be said of The Future, a film which makes the off button loom larger and larger until you give in and hit it with anything to hand.

It stars David Warshofsky, Miranda July and Hamish Linklater; but there’s really no need to get that far.

one out of five stars

Phil Hewitt

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