Imagine you are almost 30. Someone wants to date you, but thinks you're a fellow high school student. Would you tell that person your real age?
The locally produced indie film “Chaperone” explores societal pressures in a small town in Hawaiʻi Island from a predatory woman's perspective.
The story is set in rural Hawai‘i and follows the protagonist, Misha. She's a 29-year-old woman who has been alienated by her family and friends for lacking ambition. She's been working at the same movie theater since she was in high school, and lives at home with her cat, Princess Diana.
She then finds solace in an 18-year-old high school track star named Jake, who thinks she's around the same age as him.
Now, Misha faces the dilemma of telling Jake the truth.
“What's so interesting and tragic for me about Misha's behavior is she's definitely an antihero,” said Zoë Eisenberg, 37, the film's writer and director. “She definitely makes terrible decisions, but I don't think she actually starts to make terrible decisions until she starts hearing from everyone else that she's already making terrible decisions.”
Editor's note: HPR has kept spoilers to a minimum.
This is not a love story
The hour-and-45-minute-long movie played at 25 film festivals and is returning to Hawaiʻi with showings at Hilo Palace Theater and Consolidated Theatres Ward on Oʻahu.
“Chaperone” was inspired by a similar scenario that Eisenberg faced when she was 29, when a 17-year-old boy mistook her for a teenager and asked her out to a party. Eisenberg immediately declined, corrected him about her age and said that she was married.
But she lingered on the thought. What if she just went along with it?
“I just kept fixating on what kind of woman would have said yes, what kind of woman would have gone to that house party he was trying to get me to go to, and what would her life have had to look like for her to make that choice?” Eisenberg said.
Eisenberg, who also authored the novel “Significant Others,” wrote the script in 2018. It took four years for her and her producers to find funding for the film, which in the end cost less than half a million dollars, according to Eisenberg.
“That's really hard with an indie film,” she said. “It took a really long time for my producers and I to find it (funding), and part of the reason, I believe, was we had a hard time finding women to pitch the story to.”
One key scene has to do with the invasive coqui frog. They were accidentally introduced to Hawaiʻi Island in the late 1980s and have since spread. Misha asks Jake if he remembers a time when the island didn't have any. He did not, and this created an opening for Misha to tell him her real age.
But she doesn't.
“I like to view her as an unlikely predator and certainly one who doesn't understand at first what's wrong with the environment that she's been dropped into,” Eisenberg said.
The end of the film is up to the interpretation of the viewers.
Eisenberg emphasized that the film is not a romance genre, and “the ending has been divisive and polarizing.”
“I just want to encourage people to think about their choices and tread lightly,” she said. “That's something that Misha struggles with throughout the film as she gets further and further into this duplicitous lifestyle that she didn't mean to lead. She's not able to track how her choices impact the people around her.”
Actress withholds judgment
New York-based actress Mitzi Akaka, as Misha, plays a complex character.
Akaha said that when she read the script, she was empathetic with Misha's decisions. And she has to be since she's playing the part.
“She is lonely. She wants love,” Akaha said. “She is finding it, unfortunately, in this kid that she can't be honest with, which is uncool, very uncool. But also rationalizable, because she's getting what she really needs as a human to thrive. He (Jake) also seems to get what he wants in a partnership to an extent.”
Akaha said Misha lives in a reality where everyone she knows is ambitious but herself. But she seems content with her life, selling tickets at the movie theater, and has inherited a house from her late grandmother.
“She's a little bit of a stoner, too, which is often tied to lack of ambition,” she said. “Although I know a lot of really successful stoners, but she (Misha) doesn't care about fitting into that world.”
Her favorite scene in the movie was when she and her co-star, Laird Akeo, who played Jake, snuck into an ice cream shop and terrorized the business. That's because it was partially improvised and taken in one shot.
“Laird and I had been working together long enough that we really trusted each other," Akaha said. "We knew exactly how to play with each other at that point, and it made it so fun in terms of our physicality and what if I did something, he might respond this way, which is like, what human, what just what life is, but it was such a rich moment.”
What's next?
The cast is made entirely of Asian American and Pacific Islander descent. Other actors starring in “Chaperone” include Kanoa Goo, Krista Alvarez, Jessica Jade Andres and Ioane Goodhue.
So far, the movie has received 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.4/10 on IMDb.
“I have never felt more uncomfortable watching a legal relationship,” one viewer wrote.
“Hawaiian licorice pizza but a little more jaded and honest,” another viewer wrote.
Information about screenings:
Hilo Palace Theater: Sept. 11-17. Showtimes and more information here.
Consolidated Ward: Sept. 12-21. Showtimes and more information here.
ProArts Maui: Sept. 13 & 14. More information here.
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