Chaperone

SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! Ambition is not for everyone. Some people are actually content with where they’re at in life. In writer/director Zoe Eisenberg’s can’t-take-your-eyes-off of drama, Chaperone, the main character named Misha (Mitzi Akaha) struggles with friends and family who are upset that she is okay with the perceived mediocrity of working at a movie theater box office for years while living alone in a house bigger than she needs. The twenty-nine-year-old Misha compounds her issues with acceptance exponentially when she starts dating a high school student named Jake (Laird Akeo), who mistakes her for a fellow student.

It starts with Misha’s manager, Kenzie (Jessica Jade Andres), trying to give Misha a promotion, but she doesn’t want one because it would mean more responsibility, leading to more stress. She goes on a date with a random guy who assumes she’s in her early twenties, but when she tells her real age, the guy checks out because he sees how unambitious she is. The rejection doesn’t seem to faze her because Misha is content to smoke marijuana and hang out with her seventeen-year-old cat named Princess Diana. That is, until she has a chance encounter with Jake at the theater box office, and then again at the grocery store where he works. She wears a T-shirt from a rival high school, so Jake assumes that Misha is a student too, and a budding romance blooms under false pretenses because she’s too scared to speak up about it. 

“…mistakes her for a fellow student…”

The film is set and was filmed in beautiful Hawaii, featuring an all AANHPI (Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander) cast, and is billed as “this is not a love story” on the poster. Eisenberg could have fooled me because much of it feels like an off-beat older woman with a younger man love story like Harold and Maude, albeit much more realistic, a lot less strange, and featuring a younger woman than the elderly Maude. The blending of that style, coupled with the theme of a lack of ambition, like the Dude from The Big Lebowski (except played straight instead of comedically), makes for a captivating and fresh feel to the movie.

A scene early on that is essential to understanding Misha is when she attends a kid’s party with Kenzie. She watches as Kenzie struggles to deal with two kids who need attention and says, “This is your life?” It’s telling that she’s not ready for that kind of responsibility. Another scene that is important to her character is when Misha breaks into her brother Vik’s (Kanoa Goo) ice cream shop late at night to get hot and heavy with Jake. Vik thinks that it was a long-time employee who made the mess and fires her, and Misha stands by silently. Who needs the stress of confrontation, not Misha?

Everything about Chaperone is superb, from the cast, location, writing, and directing to the cinematography. Mitzi Akaha and Laird Akeo have instant chemistry onscreen, and everyone else plays their roles perfectly. I find Misha’s character to be highly compelling because she’s extremely relatable. Yet, we hardly ever see this type of happily unambitious character in the lead-up on the big screen in a drama. Some may not care for the ending, although I did not have that issue because it felt realistic to me. Chaperone isn’t your typical rom com/drama, it’s more like a rare and beautiful exotic bird out in the wild that you were happy just to catch a glimpse of.