Me and You and Everyone We Know is awfully good. It brings me back in time; it seems a time-capsule of what we are now—"we" defined as, I don't know—a certain set of people including me. Or what we were three years ago.

I was reluctant and skeptical, but after five minutes I was thoroughly mesmerized. Where did I read that it was unfocused, cold, and sly, a work of textbook postmodernism? That's off! What other film of the past five years is as warm? (Tense, and disturbing, but still warm).

I thought I read somewhere that it was set in the Northwest (US)? Once I saw the landscape, I was sure it was the Northwest. The modern low-rise apartment buildings (those peculiar concrete-mesh decorations), the lawns, the dull iron railings and suburban alleyways. The preposterously christened apartment buildings: "St. Tod" in the movie, "Fireside Lanai," "The General" and "Excalibur" were in my old neighborhoods. I find it so sweet—honestly—this tiny effort to differentiate, to make special, to personalize.

Could this movie have been made at any time? No, I think—it could only have been made in the gentle waking sleep of my childhood, and simultaneously in the optimism of my own young adulthood. I say this, and I love it, I treasure the film and its people.

But all these Death Cab for Cutie aesthetics make me worried. This paragraph is your spoiler alert. If you haven't seen the movie, you shouldn't read on—and You know who you are.

An observation: Me and You... is like loads of stories I've taken in lately, which turn on a special romance that is uttery unexplained, yet obviously inevitable. Here's the refresher: After a random meeting, Christine (single, creative, cute but not gorgeous, supremely well dressed) and John (separated, impulsive, urban, vaguely mystical but down to earth) hit off well for a few minutes, indulging in a child-like fantasy while they walk to their cars—from then on they have to get together (the fractured narrative throws us off the scent, but it comes around in the end). After many fits and starts, the film ends with a long, delicate, enigmatic hug. Recap: John, the slightly-broken, leathery-stubbled, yet mostly open-hearted and honest man is held sweetly by the thin arms of the fragile, porcelain-skinned, introspective, yet quietly-daring Christine... who knows almost nothing about him. Their lives are on the cusp of changing, we think. They will change each other. Her bravery in reaching out to him, his acceptance of the truth, the beauty, of their encounter, not to mention their celebration of the random events that eventually brought them together across the vagaries of (fractured! fractured!) contemporary life: these are their final virtues, which give the narrative its closure, which send us out of the cinema in grace.

I call foul. Is this it? Is this how it works? What does she see in him? Is it possible they could prosper together? They know nothing about each other—the fiction of their destined unity is trumped up: it's built on circumstantial evidence. Evidence of a kind that's easy to find in our random (fractured!) contemporary world.

If there is anything to believe in here, it is that her tender, tender embrace (and it is tender), and his stunned gaze into the distance, are an exchange of something, something important—some love, not eternal, not perfect, but some act of love, of appreciation. This would be a fine poem. Ships passing in the night; but imparting some wonder, some happiness, as they pass.

Still, I smell rats.

Miranda July is a sophisticated, original artist. Does she see herself as the tender, vulnerable woman who just needs to reach out? Is it her life to work a lowly job (some form of caretaking, ideally), doing art as much as she can, living humbly within her means, idolizing her own private fears and crushes, trying to connect, trying to care. Hoping some scarred, fallen, but once-perfect (in his child's imagination, perhaps), young man needs her feminine touch, her caring, her launched empathy? That he will give her the chance to impart that bit of wonder, that bit of love, even if the man's pragmatism pulls him away (because no romance is ideal anymore, no—we are fractured fractured).

It seems to me to be everywhere: in life, in films, in books, this trope, this idea.

Have contemporary women completely forgotten what their 2nd-wave forebears fought for—that is, the right (maybe even the obligation) to participate: in the hardship of life, and the glory, the pleasure, of confronting that hardship?

"We have the rest of our lives to spend together, but you have to call me first," she says—what a heartbreaking thought.