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Performance artist Miranda July’s debut feature is like a number of movies about interconnecting lives and kooky relationships made recently by women — Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity, Rose Troche’s The Safety of Objects, Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing. Taking the Dermot Mulroney part is John Hawkes, affecting and humorous as a shoe salesman rebounding from a broken marriage and resisting the advances of an aspiring performance artist played with authoritative kookiness by July herself. This romance has charm, feeling, and rueful comedy, and yet I was more intrigued by the things off to the side, like the sexual explorations of Hawkes’s two sons, or the secret trousseau of the sad, pallid neighbor girl. Maybe that’s what makes a film an independent film. It suggests a life independent of its being a film.
BY PETER KEOUGH
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