There’s a quick glimpse at a street in Portland towards the end of “In Waves” as AJ (Will Sharpe) and Kristen (Stephanie Hsu) make their way up to the Pacific Northwest from their home by the beach in Southern California that I could swear I’ve stopped by myself, hardly a destination for tourists but one of the city’s charming neighborhoods where restaurants have taken residence in houses with the scene set just outside what I remember as a Vietnamese restaurant. While the backdrop was recognizable, it was the way AJ and Kristen looked themselves on that street that sparked my own memories — the way they moved and found their place in the environment, making me lose all sense that I was watching a movie, let alone one that was animated to exacerbate that fact.
One doesn’t have to have spent time in Portland for that feeling to hit in Phuong Mai Nguyen’s shimmering adaptation of AJ Dungo’s graphic novel, detailing his first love with a young woman who goes from spending her days riding high at the beach to being laid low by a cancer diagnosis. Unmistakably a tearjerker, it comes by its sentiment honestly as it unfolds in accordance with one of Kristen’s wishes for AJ to put his talent at drawing to use in telling an epic story – what she believes is the history of surfing, but is actually their grand romance as she attempts to fend off a tumor that won’t seem to go away. The two grow up in Huntington Beach, otherwise known as “Surf City USA” where a statue of Duke Kahanamoku, who popularized the sport, stands nearby the ocean and while Kristen quickly got pulled in by the waves, AJ somehow never took an interest until hormones kicked in and after clumsily running into Kristen at a school dance and falling for her in other ways, he realizes that to love her to also love the water.
Despite Kristen putting AJ on solid footing on a surfboard, the two never entirely seem to find it on dry land, first awkwardly engaging over texts when they don’t want to risk the embarrassment of rejection in person and subsequently keeping their connection a bit of a secret from Kristen’s family, posing issues once she is largely under their care after taking ill. It isn’t just the subtle, sophisticated microgestures that are a part of impressionistic, hand-painted style that ring true, but the tentativeness that the couple approaches one another out of fear of making an already delicate situation worse. The fact that the worst could come is acknowledged early when glimpses of AJ on a gloomy day at the beach all alone in a camper from the future are interspersed through the present, as are scenes from the distant past as he tries illustrating the history of surfing, but just as water finds its level, the fluidity of experience ensures that the drama is never overwrought and Nguyen often fashions transitions that envision time as a continuum where life is constantly pressing ahead, occasionally to the characters’ dismay as it seems like it’s running out, but their fate placed in a larger context that makes it easier to accept.
The sensitivity to the unfolding tragedy at hand is certainly touching, but it’s the general attention to detail throughout that makes “In Waves” ultimately so moving when AJ and Kristen’s relationship is so fully realized as well as the former’s growth. They emerge as a couple amidst a friend group that includes her older brother Jeff and his friend Ian, making AJ’s gradual acceptance by not only Kristen but everyone in her orbit give him greater confidence and when it’s her at first who breaks his fall at the school dance, it becomes all the more poignant when he becomes a pillar of strength for her as she struggles to stand on her own. “In Waves” may leave everyone both on screen and off in a pool of salt water, but the beautifully bittersweet love story proves buoyant.
“In Waves” will screen again on May 13th at the Miramar at 2:45 pm and 8:30 pm, May 14th at Le Raimu at 7 pm, May 15th at 9 am at La Licorne and May 22nd at 2 pm at Studio 13.