Kajillionaire (2020)
Written and Directed by: Miranda July
Starring: Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez
Premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2020.
It's a quirky, whimsical, crime comedy. It's about a very weird parent-child relationship. A 26-year old woman is manipulated by her con-artist parents who use her as an accomplice in all their scams and thefts. Poor thing, she doesn't know what it means to be loved by her parents and she thinks this is normal. When Melanie asks her in what sense she thinks they are her parents, and her answer is that they split the money from the scams into three equal parts. It was funny and heartbreaking too. But apart from moments like this, the film overall didn't have an emotional/ a strong effect on me. Old Dolio - her character seems like she's out of place, with her extra large track suits and there's a constant scowl on her face.
It felt like the film navigates through unpredictable territories because it doesn't stick to a theme, or structure. Maybe the only structure the film has, could be about how arc of the child-parent relationship progresses over the period of the film. The inciting incident would be when Old Dolio gets to know about the difference between how the child would turn up depending on the baby crawling on the mom's breast or if the baby is placed beside. She keeps thinking from then, and then after Melanie enters them - they sort of have a gap and the lowest point would be perhaps when she realizes that they never called her 'hon'. And again, they apologize and the reconciliation happens before they again con her. So it's like an on-off thing that keeps happening throughout the film.
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