Chaperone

One of the great social developments in Western society is the freedom individuals have to buck cultural mores, and take their own paths.

Largely gone in Western society are the rites of passage that designate what makes a child an adult beyond physical age and legal accountability. Tradition may have once dictated these signposts -- but that, too, is giving way to individual freedom.

When it comes to Hawai'i, speaking from personal experience -- time passes almost imperceptively -- with no discernible shift in the seasons to signal change, no obvious ebbing and flowing of the transitory nature of time. The leaves do not fall. The grass stays green. The sun sets as it always has in its place month after month. And time, merely passes.

In writer and director Zoë Eisenberg's CHAPERONE, we are introduced to Misha (Mitzi Akaha), a single 29-year-old living in a small, bucolic Hawai'i village (Hilo suburbs?), working -- as she has since her high school days, at a local, fledgling arthouse movie theater. With her life seemingly on cruise-control, Misha seems content to carry on in this relatively blissful state of suspended animation.

Akaha's portrayal of Misha, reminiscent of Mike Leigh's HAPPY-GO-LUCKY (2008) starring Sally Hawkins' -- also a 30-year-old, insufferably optimistic and cloyingly content Londoner whose outlook on life was exasperating to her peers, offers a genuine portrait of what arrested development looks like in Hawai'i.

Misha's longtime friend and co-worker Kenzie (Jessica Jade Andres) and brother Vic (Kanoa Goo) remain constant reminders that she should be challenging herself more and accepting the inevitable: she is 29 going on 30 and should start acting like it.

When Misha is confused for a fellow high-schooler during a meet-cute with 18-year-old Jake (Laird Akeo) -- she decides to carry on the ruse more out of defiance until reality superimposes itself with a series of terrible decisions when her reckless spontaneity catch...