LFF 2020: Kajillionaire
lff 2020
Kajillionaire, Miranda July’s return behind the camera after an almost decade-long directorial hiatus, could be seen as a companion piece to this year’s Academy Award winner – Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. In fact, the two films briefly co-existed in the zeitgeist when Bong’s juggernaut was powering through the awards season and July’s film was generating a considerable buzz at the Sundance Film Festival. However, although they share quite a lot of thematic DNA, Kajillionaire has more than enough personality to stand on its own two feet.
It has to be acknowledged that even the basic premise of July’s film will ring eerily familiar to anybody who has seen Parasite. The story in Kajillionaire revolves around a family of scammers, a socially awkward Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) and her parents (Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins) who live on the very margin of society. They dwell in a disused office and spend their days roaming around the city, planning and executing cons of various calibre. One day, they end up inviting a stranger into the fold (Gina Rodriguez), which fractures an already bizarre dynamic between this strange family of weirdos.
Then, Kajillionaire veers off the beaten track and subverts the expectations one would logically place upon the narrative based on its initial premise and thematic makeup. This is because the film’s primary interest does not reside with defining the parameters of injustice native to the American class system nearly as much as it looks like based on a cursory inspection. It is certainly true to an extent, and an astute viewer will find it easy to fish out some truly intriguing elements of social commentary. As the camera shadows the family and acclimates the viewer to their modus operandi, the filmmaker clearly makes a handful of observations regarding the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. In addition, as the story goes on, July keeps re-emphasising a very particular note within her narrative melody: loneliness, which is initially struck as an accent building depth within the conversation about the class divide the film is seemingly exploring. But this association is a red herring because Kajillionaire is only partially aligned with the type of discourse Parasite was interested in having.
Underneath the blanket of broad interest in peeking into the gutter of American Dream and illuminating the fact it is a zero-sum game, July hides a deeply thought-provoking discussion about a different kind of loneliness – one stemming from parental neglect and chronic psychological abuse. And this is where Evan Rachel Wood’s acting prowess was an indispensable tool in bringing this theme to the fore. This pivotal discussion is completely dependent on her character of Old Dolio. Wood gives a simply showstopping performance, which should stay in conversation come the next awards season, as a visibly troubled young woman who – as the story eventually teases out – grapples with a lifetime of pain she has carried quietly behind her eyes. It is an absolute marvel to observe how – little by little – her character hijacks the limelight and turns what promised to be an allegorical take on America’s cultural relationship with success into something profound and extremely uncomfortable to process. It is a lamentation on just how easy it is to ruin a child’s life by choosing to prioritise one’s own pursuit of happiness over their wellbeing.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Kajillionaire is something special. Thanks to Miranda July’s clever storytelling combined with idiosyncratic direction borrowing somewhat from the early works of Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket and The Royal Tenenbaums), the film finds unique balance between its bifurcating thematic modes. Even though it looks as though it was a social satire morphing into a more internalised divagation on pain, co-dependency and abuse, the two coexist simultaneously. As a result, Kajillionaire is best understood as a stylised melting pot of cultural commentary aspiring to say something about broader aspects of society while reciting an elegy about innocence killed in utero by adults who never had any interests venturing beyond their own self-interest. As such, while it is going to be challenging to digest upon one single sitting, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire is most definitely going to be impossible to forget. Uplifting and punishing in equal measures and as sweet as it is bitter, this film is undeniably singular, uniquely beautiful and frighteningly relevant.
