Film review

  • Kajillionaire

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Miranda July (2020)

    In present-day Los Angeles, Robert and Theresa Dyne and their daughter run a family business of sorts.  They’re low-tech scammers and thieves; they steal packages from mailboxes, with a view to selling, or claiming a refund on, the contents – that kind of thing.  Crime doesn’t pay well for the Dynes.  They sometimes scavenge for food.  The roof over their heads is that of a bubble factory, where they sleep on the floor of a disused office.   They enter newspaper competitions in the hope of legitimate reward.  In one way, though, their business is well established:  Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) have been petty criminals for decades.  Their twenty-six-year-old daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), is named for a vagrant who got rich and famous late in life when he won the lottery.  (The Dynes optimistically figured he might leave his money to a namesake; in the event, he spent his fortune before he died.)  This is the modus vivendi her parents long ago chose and the only one their offspring has ever known – it seems odds against her achieving any kind of distance from the bizarrely claustrophobic family unit.  Miranda July’s dramedy Kajillionaire turns into the story of how Old Dolio confounds those odds.

    This being California, there are frequent earth tremors.  July uses them as a dual metaphor – to evoke the precarity of the Dynes’ existence and the possibility of disturbing the status quo.  (The ‘big one’ to which the tremors build results, for Old Dolio, in a spell of what she experiences as death-like darkness followed by an epiphany.)  There are two major plot catalysts for change.  Months behind with the rent on their primitive accommodation, the trio creeps along the factory exterior, bending low to the ground, in a vain attempt to avoid being noticed by the building manager (Mark Ivanir).  Old Dolio devises, as a means of paying their debts, a lost-luggage-cum-travel-insurance scam that takes her and her parents on a brief round trip to New York City (travelling with tickets they won in a competition).  On the plane, they meet vivacious Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) whom Robert and Theresa, to their daughter’s surprise, invite to join in the scam.  This doesn’t come off as planned but Melanie remains part of the team when they return to Los Angeles.  An optician’s assistant, she introduces the Dynes to elderly patients of the practice ripe for ripping off.

    The second catalyst is ante-natal classes attended by Old Dolio, on behalf of an expectant mother unwilling to go herself but willing to pay a few dollars to a proxy.  Here Old Dolio discovers the aberrant nature of her own upbringing.  Her parents have nurtured in her a sense of fair play (what money they make is always split three ways) and a strong work ethic (the Dynes are no layabouts) but have also denied her conventional signs of love and affection.  They’ve never bought her a birthday present or even used terms of endearment (that has to be the phrase with Debra Winger in the picture) when speaking to her.  When Old Dolio challenges Theresa about this, the mother scornfully accuses the daughter of wanting parents who are feeble and phoney.

    This is Miranda July’s third feature as writer-director, fifteen years after the first (Me and You and Everyone We Know) and nine since the second (The Future).  In the meantime, she has kept busy as a writer and multimedia performance artist, and made occasional screen appearances – most recently, in Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline (2018).  Me and You and Everyone We Know may have helped John Hawkes’ screen career and Hamish Linklater was a familiar face on American television by the time he starred opposite July in The Future but she has got together a much higher-profile cast to play the main roles in Kajillionaire.  (Given how rarely she appears in films, Winger’s involvement is a particular coup.)  The integrity of the acting, combined with July’s evident empathy with eccentrics, prevents the Dynes from being merely cute criminals – a relief to this viewer.  It’s not much of a plus, though, when the main characters, except for Melanie, are predominantly dismal instead.

    Besides, July doesn’t resist creating an emphatically wacky visual and musical environment for them – in the clouds of roseate foam coursing down the walls of the bubble factory, in the liberal use of Emile Mosseri’s quirky score.  (Mosseri’s music for Minari is recognisably the work of the same composer but less intrusive.)  Bobby Vinton’s 1960s hit single ‘Mr Lonely’, repeatedly heard as an instrumental during Kajillionaire then with Vinton’s vocals over the closing credits, reinforces the soundtrack’s cloying whimsicality.

    As soon as Melanie arrives on the scene, Robert and Theresa treat her differently from how they treat their daughter – when Melanie gets upset they console her and call her ‘hon’ – but I couldn’t fathom why, except that it significantly influences Old Dolio’s attitude towards her parents.   Assuming Robert and Theresa have never previously recruited an outsider, I didn’t understand either why they start now (beyond the fact that, again, it’s crucial to the plot).  While Old Dolio is at an ante-natal class, her parents propose a threesome to Melanie, though without success – is this a new departure for them?  July obviously didn’t set out to create a work of rigorous realism but I think her ‘surrealism’ – as some critics call it – could also be termed incoherence.  It’s certainly confusing.

    The Dynes are a pathologically close-knit family and Old Dolio is clearly on the receiving end of an abusive relationship of sorts.  Introducing her parents’ sexual tastes into the mix, through their proposition to Melanie, has the effect of raising – or, rather, renewing – questions in your mind as to exactly what sort of abuse Old Dolio’s been the victim of.  Early on in the film, she goes to a massage parlour, intending to cash in a voucher for a session there.  When the proprietor, Jenny (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), says no, Old Dolio reluctantly agrees to have the session, and lies on the massage table fully dressed.  She can’t, however, bear Jenny to touch her.  Her uniform of oversized sweatshirt and jogging bottoms, like her swag of long, lank hair, seem designed to cover as much of her face and body as possible, as if she’s in purdah.  Theresa’s clothes and, especially, her hair are very similar to Old Dolio’s her daughter’s.  I couldn’t help wondering if July was implying Robert might have treated his wife and daughter as two of a kind.  She probably isn’t but she doesn’t definitely rule it out and does make use of abuse-victim tropes in the way she presents Old Dolio (who also avoids eye contact).

    The young woman’s predicament may be intended, rather, as a black comedy exaggeration of parents refusing to let their child attain individuality and independence – but why does that also entail withholding affection?  Increasingly distressed by that, Old Dolio accepts Melanie’s invitation to stay in her apartment.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder:  Robert and Theresa turn up at Melanie’s with seventeen birthday presents for their daughter, promising another at a dinner arranged for the following evening.  They prove not to be reformed characters – there’s another, major theft, as well as another present, to come – but the film ends hopefully.  In the last scene, Old Dolio and Melanie go to a supermarket to get refunds on the birthday presents.  The last shot is a prolonged kiss between them, summing up Old Dolio’s breakthrough into achieving physical contact (including eye contact), into a relationship with someone other than her mother and father.

    The best episode in Kajillionaire – perhaps the only one that achieves emotional substance as well as compelling attention – is a visit to the home of one of Melanie’s boss’s patients – bedridden man, close to death.  He asks the Dynes and Melanie to pretend to be his family in the minutes before he slips into oblivion.  Theresa gets out tea things, Robert talks about mowing the lawn, and so on.  Acceding to an extraordinary request, they suddenly seem within touching distance of normality.  The playing here is admirably naturalistic – and Miranda July, for once, stops reminding the viewer how off-the-wall things are.  For the most part, her insistence on this gives her film-making a viscous quality.  Kajillionaire isn’t long film but it’s very slow-moving.  It had its British premiere on the first night of last year’s London Film Festival.  I was keen to see it then but it clashed with The Disciple – I opted for Chaitanya Tamhane’s film because I thought there might be a longer wait for it to become available online subsequently (as there was).  I don’t regret the choice I made a few months ago.  The Disciple isn’t an easy watch but it’s worth the effort.   Despite the contributions of some fine actors, I’m not sure the same can be said for Kajillionaire.

    27 April 2021

  • Collective

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Colectiv

    Alexander Nanau (2019)

    On 30th October 2015 a fire broke out at the Club Colectiv in Bucharest during a performance by the metalcore band Goodbye to Gravity.  Twenty-seven people lost their lives there that night; more than 180 were injured.  Almost immediately, the tragedy was recognised as a consequence of the malpractice widely seen as endemic to Romanian public life:  the club, which had only one fire exit, had been granted an operating licence in spite of having no fire safety accreditation.  Mass demonstrations led to the resignation of the country’s Social Democrat government within a few days of the fire.  (All members of the replacement government appointed by the President of Romania and led by the agronomist Dacian Cioloș were ‘technocrats’, none of them formally affiliated with any political organisation.)  A further 37 of the injured subsequently died in hospital, some as a result of grossly inadequate healthcare that also reflected systemic corruption.  In his documentary Collective (recently shown in BBC4’s Storyville slot), Alexander Nanau charts how journalists, chiefly Cătălin Tolontan, exposed the extent of wrongdoing in this next phase of the Colectiv scandal, and the unrelenting political turbulence that ensued.

    From the very start, the camera – Nanau is also the cinematographer – is in the thick of the action, as it happens.  The terrier-like Tolontan is first seen at a press conference where victims’ parents describe their children’s suffering and death in the weeks following the fire.  (Regardless of whether this was the actual start of Tolontan’s involvement in the case, that’s what Nanau, in effect, suggests.)  This is followed by the film’s only flashback, a video shot on someone’s phone inside the Colectiv on the fatal night.  The footage conveys the fire’s terrifyingly rapid spread.  Andrei Găluț, Goodbye to Gravity’s vocalist, stops singing when he notices ‘a problem’; seconds later, the whole place is engulfed in flames.  (Though the film doesn’t mention this, Găluț was the only one of the group’s five members to survive the fire.)  From this point on, Nanau moves forward single-mindedly, capturing the growing momentum of Tolontan’s investigation in tandem with the expanding scale of the misconduct it reveals.  Patients died in Romanian hospitals that lacked the facilities needed to offer proper treatment to burns victims.  Some succumbed to bacterial infections that might have been prevented if the disinfectants used hadn’t been diluted by a national supplier, Hex Pharma, to 10% of their supposed strength.

    Without sensationalising, Nanau has crafted a non-fiction narrative that’s intensely dramatic – to a degree rare in fictional film dramas.  The accumulating evidence of iniquity exerts a terrible grip.  Some of the significant figures in the story make their entrance and an impression, reappear and have a different impact.  Tedy Ursuleanu, a young woman who survived the fire despite very serious burns, is the subject of an extraordinary photo shoot and the centre of attention at the opening of an exhibition of the images of her face and body, then is seen learning to use a prosthetic hand.  Dan Condrea, the Hex Pharma chief executive, is a shadowy figure glimpsed two three times in long shot.  Soon after the launch of a criminal investigation into his activities, Condrea dies in a car crash, which may have been an accident or suicide or murder.  Patriciu Achimaș-Cadariu, the initial health minister appointment in the Cioloș government, presides at two press conferences.  At the first, he smoothly insists that testing of the Hex Pharma disinfectants has shown them to be 95% effective.  At the second, he announces his resignation, gets up and leaves:  no further questions.

    Collective repeatedly illustrates the penetration of corruption – or, at least, of the resigned acceptance of corruption – within the Romanian political establishment, health system and perhaps even the press.  Camelia Riou, a hospital doctor and whistleblower who contacts Tolontan’s team with video of a Colectiv burns victim whose head wounds are crawling with worms, is presented as a fearless rarity within her profession.  Foul-mouthed hospital manager Florin Secureanu is brought to book for embezzling hospital funds but the whistleblower in this case may have been fed up with her boss’s verbal threats and abuse rather than appalled by his fraud.  (Secureanu can’t help looking like a thug but this is a case where appearances evidently aren’t deceptive.  He’s also a university professor and – you couldn’t make it up – a member of the national Anti-corruption Directorate.)  Tolontan works for Gazeta Sporturilor, a Romanian daily that, as its name makes clear, is primarily a sports newspaper.  It’s the country’s highest-profile journal of its kind but its unique coverage of the Colectiv aftermath is, someone suggests, testimony to the pusillanimity of mainline investigative journalism in Romania.

    Achimaș-Cadariu’s successor as health minister is Vlad Voiculescu.  This pale, bespectacled, unremarkable-looking man – a technocrat who’s the picture of a bureaucrat – also gradually succeeds Tolontan as the film’s protagonist, and emerges as its other hero.  The physical and temperamental contrasts between Tolontan and Voiculescu are compelling.  The journalist is solid, pugnacious and imperturbably articulate, in television discussions as well as, one assumes, in print.  For a while, Voiculescu, who introduces himself at his first ministerial press conference as a former patients’ rights activist, seems hesitant, maybe out of his depth. Yet his keen intelligence, tenacity and growing realisation of the impossibility of achieving thoroughgoing reform, are an increasingly impressive combination.

    Collective features no talking heads of the usual documentary kind (Tedy Ursuleanu’s damaged face is more than eloquent without words, though she has poignant things to say, too).  By largely eschewing considered retrospection, Nanau maximises his film’s powerful immediacy but also leaves himself open to criticism of not supplying enough context.  He doesn’t, for example, explain the cause of the fire (Goodbye to Gravity’s pyrotechnics show ignited the Club Colectiv’s flammable acoustic foam); or whether Gazeta Sporturilor, despite its main focus, has covered non-sporting stories before; or, if so, whether Tolontan and his key colleagues, the solemnly persistent Mirela Neag  and Răzvan Luţac, have previous experience in such journalism.  Although it would have helped to be told these things, I think Nanau’s approach is justified, and not only because, in Romania, the details of the Colectiv disaster and what followed are no doubt already well known.  His film runs close to two hours as it is:  Nanau had to make hard choices about what to include.

    For anyone who (like me) narrowly assumed the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election results to be the full extent of democratic lunacy on the planet in 2016, Collective delivers a vicious sting in the tail.  The Social Democratic Party (PSD) wins that December’s general election – and wins big.  A radio news bulletin reports dismally low turnout among younger voters.  If the final official figures were anything like those mentioned here, this seems to be another instance of political cynicism being its own reward[1].  We watch Vlad Voiculescu absorb the results but Alexander Nanau returns finally to the people he started with, bereaved families visiting the graves of their loved ones at Christmas 2016.  I get vexed when the praise accorded a screen drama reflects the importance of its subject matter rather than its dramatic quality.  This documentary scores sky-high in both departments.  It’s exceptionally powerful cinema.

    20 April 2021

    [1] That said, post-Ceaușescu Romania is an electorally volatile place.  In December 2016, the PSD still fell short of an absolute parliamentary majority.  The resulting coalition lasted only a few months and there were four subsequent administrations between 2017 and 2020.   In the current coalition government, headed by Florin Cîțu, Vlad Voiculescu resumed the Minister of Health portfolio.  He was fired by Cîțu just a few days before I watched Collective, apparently in the light of issues around his department’s handling of Romania’s response to Covid.

     

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