Waikiki dir. by Christopher Kahunahana (review)

The tragedy of Hawai'i, from an Indigenous perspective, is the tragedy of settler colonialism. With the establishment of permanent residence by Americans and Europeans in the early nineteenth century, Kānaka Ma'oli became subject to what Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung termed "structural violence," which asserts its cruelties in institutional rather than just face-to-face forms. They were victimized not only by foreign diseases for which they had no resistance but also by the loss of land to entrepreneurs and culture to missionaries without getting anything in return in terms of opportunities, much less respect. Now, two centuries later, their efforts to build and sustain meaningful, sovereign lives go on—both for the culture as a whole and for individual Hawaiians—amid the vulgarities of tourism. If one thinks of Hollywood's Hawai'i in Waikiki Wedding (1937), Blue Hawaii (1961), The Descendants (2011), or Aloha (2015), Waikiki, which is the first feature film written and directed by a Native Hawaiian, is dark and bleak, both literally and figuratively. But how could it be otherwise? However grim, Waikiki is nevertheless a spellbinding rendering of the decentered world that many Hawaiians endure. It centers on Kea (Danielle Zalopany), who experiences domestic violence, houselessness, and, not least, mental illness, for which she takes medication.

Kea lives among visions and voices from her past. She seems to have been raised by grandparents: a grandmother who loved and cared for her and a grandfather who abandoned her in the street when she was young. Her present is based on the streets of downtown Honolulu, where she sleeps in a van; in a classroom, where she teaches Hawaiian children to acknowledge a sacred relationship with the land; at Amy's Bar, where she works; and in a hotel dining room, where she performs as a smiling hula dancer on stage.She has Branden (Jason Quinn), an alternately violent and compassionate boyfriend, with whom she apparently has a daughter we never meet. She also has Wo (Peter Shinkoda), a nearly mute homeless man, whom she knocks over one night while driving madly away from a fight with her partner. Despite her own rage, Kea eventually befriends Wo after the accident, and the movie follows them as they drive around town in Kea's van, windshield wipers adorned with several parking tickets, until it is finally towed away while she is at work.

Waikiki has a strong visual rhythm. The daylight is often given to Kea's visions of her grandmother sitting on a metal chair in the becalmed shallows of a bay, singing to her or assuring her. But a lot of the narrative occurs in the darkness of night when she walks with Wo, works in a dimly lit bar, or sits alone on the pavement of a parking lot after her van, and Wo, have gone missing. Kea also has a memory that is repeatedly aroused when she reaches her wit's end. In the blurry vision, she is a young girl who watches as a senior man—apparently her grandfather—leaves her sitting on the corner of some kind of wall in town and promises to return for her.

However, the night scenes are often too poorly lit to follow what is actually going on. Moreover, Kea's thoughts and memories, which are not necessarily depicted in anything like a linear sequence and are not clearly differentiated from her immediate reality, are hard to follow. Wo and Kea are having breakfast at a greasy spoon, for example. She playfully cuts out a face in her big pancake with her teeth, and Wo tries to feed it. Four young men at an adjacent table ridicule the two of them. Kea goes to the bathroom, where she has another vision of her grandmother sitting in the waters of the bay, singing to her and doing hula motions with her arms and hands. Kea looks in the bathroom mirror to see her grandmother now standing in the background and looking over her shoulder. With...