Miranda July’s long-awaited third feature, who is disburdened from acting in front of the camera this time, KAJILLIONAIRE is a madcap comedy about a family of petty grifters, Robert and Theresa Dyne (Jenkins and Winger, both ), and their daughter Old Dolio (Wood), the provenance of that peculiar name, which will be disclosed later in the film, smack encapsulates the parents’ incorrigible Weltanschauung.

Proud of subsisting with their entire existence through skimming and petty theft, Robert and Theresa indoctrinate Old Dolio with unorthodox ideas (totally disavowing capitalistic and consumerist impulses and obsessions) and treat her as a partner-in-crime rather than their daughter. Thus, Old Dolio is a kooky cookie, sporting a head of straight, long hair like her mother, she seems to be eternally at odds with her surroundings, there is always a question mark hanging aloft her lanky, stiff demeanor. She is physically tense since a phobia of human contact has gelled into a thick carapace. As Old Dolio, Wood finally finds a role so singularly different from previous ones and attempts a lower, more gravelly register, her expression also melds open-faced puzzlement with an air of infantile inscrutability, it is an affectation that befits the immanent awkwardness emanated from an out-and-out oddball.

While dodging the rent is a quotidian routine for the nuclear family, who lives in an office room adjacent to a bubble factory, thus they must fend off “foam leaking” on a daily basis, but a monthly rent of 500$ is too nice a deal to say no (Ivanir has a funny cameo as a cry-baby of a lessor), still, they are three months in arrears, a new scheme incidentally brings an outsider into the close-knit outfit, Melanie (Rodriguez), an expansive, pneumatic Puerto Rican girl (the normal kind that comprises the majority of the multitude), whose intrusion sets off some unexpected reverberations within the Dynes, most importantly, it will engender a cognitive sea change to Old Dolio, maybe, for the first time, she can finally at least hanker for a semblance of life outside her parents’ clutches. Sorry, haven’t I mentioned that it is a lesbian love story? July never conceals that romantic tingling (their electricity is blatantly palpable), and driven by her own Freudian agenda, Melanie really takes it on herself to kindle those “tender feelings” in Old Dolio, the missing parts that the latter doesn’t know she needs during her upbringing. Melanie is the same manic pixie dream girl type, but Rodriguez brings off an organic spontaneity and sympathy that is glaringly incongruous with the Dynes.

Like THE FUTURE (2011), here July’s cosmic legerdemain is an economic but far more efficacious one, when a major seismic upheaval arrives after multiple tremors (one of the amusing leitmotifs), its timing is well-timed in the pitch black, Old Dolio experiences a sidereal catharsis and finally breaks out of her shell, and her rite of passage will be topped off by an idiosyncratic (though highly improbable) heist that proves July’s brainwave is as fey and eccentric as ever, particularly in conjunction with Emile Mosseri’s heavily otherworldly score that attains a wondrous symbiosis with July’s bright, peculiar imagery. KAJILLIONAIRE heralds a gladsome welcome back of one of the most original female filmmakers in USA, whose ingenuity should no longer been overlooked.

referential entries: July’s THE FUTURE (2011, 6.3/10); ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW (2005, 8.6/10).