Love on the Beach
With its initial dimension of teenage movie tinged with romantic comedy, In Waves reveals one of its boldest ideas through a spirited gesture from its protagonist. AJ (Rio Vega), a quiet high school student in Los Angeles, belongs to a marching band and, after the victory of a local American football team, he sees his crush, Kristen (Lyna Khoudri), rise from the bleachers. He tries to call out to her, in vain, until he matches the rhythm of the music and his percussion to shout her name in the silence between beats.
It’s in this small interval, in the suspension between two heartbeats, that emotions express themselves. The film’s sensitivity and its moments of grace hide in these delicate seconds. She is obsessed with surfing, he with skateboarding and drawing, and the film doesn’t waste time showing them share their respective passions. They learn from each other through this exchange. Two shoulders brush in the water, and a world is already being written in the interaction of these delicate lines, outlining the forms of a colorful and enchanting animation, at least until illness strikes.
The line work is precisely essential in Phuong Mai Nguyen’s approach. Subtle, it traces the contours of bodies and their looming degeneration (because of cancer, Kristen will be forced to have a leg amputated), but its inherently rigid barrier to movement is counterbalanced by its sinuous transformation, like waves on an electroencephalogram.
The wave and the curve become in turn these interstices, these passages to seize to hope for surfing this relentless and too-short time. The metaphor is obvious, and yet the film gives it its power through a fluctuating narration, a back-and-forth that resists the fate of the roller doomed to crash on the shore. AJ and Kristen know that, essentially, they only have a moment to share, as fleeting as that drumbeat that seals their meeting.
Life’s Melodies
Through the gentleness of its poetry and the expressiveness of its aesthetics, where flat swaths of color oppose brushstrokes that feel unmistakably hand-drawn, In Waves has all the makings of a grand melodrama, one that mourns its history without a true antagonist, while also voicing a quiet anger that its characters can only direct toward a form of cosmic injustice. The film finds surprising expansion there, as if the intimacy of its narrative were swept up in a dizzying whirl, illustrated by sequences about Hawaii’s past and the surfing traditions, tempered by the colonization of the land.
The illness of Kristen, with its cruel arbitrariness, does not stop her from seeking meaning in her life, in that other interstice embedded in a history of immigration and a cultural melting pot that gives Los Angeles its identity (she and AJ are of Philippine descent). She draws from it a form of resistance that refuses pity, something the film’s pastel textures reinforce through a careful balance between modesty and pathos.
Despite stretches of over-explained voice-overs that dull the power of its images, Phuong Mai Nguyen grounds the legacy of AJ Dungo’s graphic memoir and Kristen’s through motion, as the drawings and the young man’s creativity come to life before our eyes.
While In Waves starts with a faithful portrait of adolescence restrained, unable to express love through gesture and touch, it evolves toward a tactile relationship that its animation sublime. Materials and bodies meet to blur the boundary of the line, though one remains: the one formed by an eye that closes forever.
