Christopher Kahunahana’s Waikiki adds to a solid block of fairly unvarnished 2023 films about the experiences of indigenous populations in the United States. In addition to Killers of the Flower Moon, the excellent documentary Lakota Nation vs. United States has been a particular highlight of my movie year. Waikiki doesn’t quite as consistently hit the aesthetic or emotional heights of those two pictures, but it does offer a captivating and admirably challenging look at the issues facing native Hawaiians today.
Set in the town of its title, — the most popular resort area on the island of Honolulu, and one of the most populated areas of all the Hawaiian islands — the film follows Kea (Danielle Zalopany), who works three jobs and lives in a van. By day, she’s a schoolteacher. By night, she’s a hula dancer at a resort and a karaoke singer at a bar. When we meet her, she lives in her van to avoid her abusive boyfriend Branden (Jason Quinn). She’s in the process of looking for a place of her own, trying desperately to make ends meet for this goal. One night, after a particularly bad altercation with Branden, Kea drives off and accidentally hits an unhoused pedestrian named Wo (Peter Shinkoda). Wo is mysterious, mostly silent, but their tenuous friendship and relatively comparable economic struggles lead the film to blossom into a strong character study of Kea, with an eye to the systems which ensure the continued deprivation of underprivileged populations.
Zalopany is brilliant in the lead role, making Kea both believably and understandably prickly, and letting us in on her funny and tender sides. Shinkoda does a nice job with his quiet role, however the film sidetracks itself when it implies a magical realism about Wo. It’s thankfully never cloying with this angle, but in its ambition to blur formal boundaries and add layers of meaning, it gets a little confusing.
Alternately, one element of boundary-blurring I must praise is Waikiki’s flashbacks. A lot of the film is about Kea’s search for meaning and connection to the land amidst the city’s imported, dominating concrete jungle. Therefore, when Kahunahana focuses on Kea’s memories of her grandmother and her memories of what was once a less-polluted landscape, the film hits its thematics quite powerfully. There’s another tranche of flashbacks that have to do with a traumatic event in Kea’s past, and unfortunately those don’t work as well as the others, and the film oddly seems to abandon them at a certain point, leaving more questions than answers in a frustrating way.
Even with its few flaws, Waikiki is still an engaging, thought-provoking directorial debut. It has the obvious clarity of purpose that comes with being directed and written by a native Hawaiian working with these particular topics, but it frequently goes above and beyond the easy simplicity of righteous anger at the issues the people of the islands face. It often speaks to the systemic heart of these issues, in ways both verbal and visual, helping forge paths for filmmakers from all backgrounds to speak truth to power through emotional authenticity. | George Napper
Waikiki is now in limited theatrical release and will be available on video-on-demand platforms December 5
