good.film
2 years ago
Why should I see Joy Ride?
To laugh really, really hard. But this isn’t just icing with no cake: there’s big substance under the surface. Joy Ride breaks free of rigid expectations and offers a new understanding of identity, and what it means to fit in.
What social causes does Joy Ride explore?
Racial Equity. Female Empowerment. Family & Community.
Every few years, we seem to get treated to a brazen new jaw-dropping comedy that seems to rewrite the rules of how far silver screen jokes can be pushed. There’s no real science to this: it just is. Think back to how different There’s Something about Mary felt in 1998, or how Bridesmaids captured the zeitgeist in 2011.
Like a boundary-pushing conga line, each new comedy that reshapes the definition of risky LOLs encourages the next film to step into its shoes and go for a run. And 2023 may have brought the next entrant in the “OMG, did she just say that?” race.
Joy Ride is the feature directing debut of Adele Lim, who wrote the $240-million-grossing Crazy Rich Asians. A Malaysian native of Chinese descent, she came to the US at 19. Flash forward to lockdown times and Lim, with her two female writing partners, were shopping their edgy new script around Hollywood. The working title? Joy F**k Club.
Risky, but it got the attention of Seth Rogen and his producing partner Josh Fagen, who knew they had to have it: “I badgered the agents and was like, ‘You got to send that to me,’ Fagen says. “It was exactly what we hoped: this Hangover/Girls Trip-type movie that had a cultural specificity that hasn't been seen in this kind of movie before.”
So Joy Ride found the perfect producers - and it’s resulted in a game-changing new comedy from a standout team of minority voices. It’s multi-layered, unapologetically bold, and funny as hell, with just the right amount of genuine emotion to ground the storyline.
Not that we advocate violence, but Joy Ride kicks off with one of the cutest kid K.O.’s you’ve ever seen. 5 year old strangers Lolo and Audrey, both Chinese, get bullied at the playground and KAPOW! That kid’ll think twice about using an Asian slur ever again. The girls decide on the spot they’re friends for life. It’s just the kind of bond Audrey needs: her white adoptive parents have been worried about her feeling isolated and disconnected.
Cut to now and Audrey’s a successful lawyer, and Lolo’s an eccentric, struggling artist (whose go-to designs usually revolve around penises and vaginas “to make a statement”). The next stage of Audrey’s law career involves a trip to China to close a deal - so naturally, Lolo tags on as Audrey’s +1 while deciding it’s the perfect chance to track down Audrey’s birth mother.
Also on the ride? Deadeye, Lolo’s deadpan cousin who’s never short of a blunt answer - we get pretty quickly that she’s neurodivergent. Landing in China, the trio become a foursome when Kat joins in, on a break from her wildly successful run as a Chinese soap star. Together, it’s a recipe for some wild times and hard truths.
Audrey might seem like she has her life together, but we start to see her polished exterior hides a slew of insecurities. Like her feelings about her cultural heritage. Having lived in the same small, predominantly white town all her life, Audrey is skilled at ‘code switching’ to progress up the white corporate ladder.
That’s when someone, usually from a minority group, adjusts their language or behaviour to ‘fit in’ to a mostly Western workplace or community. In a recent ABC article, people of minorities described the trait as a "survival tool", with one saying "As soon as I stepped outside of that safe bubble of home, I told myself: ‘OK, I'm outside. It's time to not be Chinese'." Whether the person’s doing it deliberately or unknowingly, code-switching can take a real psychological toll.
Ashley Park, who plays Audrey, described in an interview how the habit muddles Audrey’s own sense of self: “Real code switching is about what tactic you're going to use to make it easier for the other person to understand and see you. ‘Who am I talking to, where am I trying to go, and how am I going to make everybody the most comfortable so I can get there?’ In the movie, we see the breakdown of that a lot.”
Unfortunately for Audrey, this is still a comedy, so her business meeting - at a pulsing nightclub, with an unhinged, rave-obsessed executive - puts her code-switching strategies to the test in the most stomach churning of ways. Thousand-year-egg shots, anybody?
“This movie is this joy-filled, bananas romp, getting into the most insane, sometimes dangerous, very sexually inappropriate situations and coming out on the other side being stronger for it.” ~ Director, Adele Lim
But the heart of the movie might lie with Lolo, a free-spirited rule breaker whose mantra is to live out loud. “She’s very unapologetic, kind of an outspoken loose cannon,” says Sherry Cola, who plays Lolo. “The things that come out of her mouth are refreshing as hell because it breaks the “submissive” and “timid” societal stereotypes that Asian women have been boxed in for years.”
Then there’s Kat, who’s dealing with fame and hiding her true desires as a sex-positive, experimental lover because she’s engaged to a devout Christian. And Deadeye, who embraces her self-proclaimed “freak” status, but is quietly navigating being queer and being on the spectrum.
Like we said, Joy Ride is the duck’s legs of MA15+ comedies - there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface!
Joy Ride walks a fine tightrope for sure, pushing the envelope hard with its comedic scenes before reeling us back in during emotional moments. The interesting part is asking yourself: without the shock value, would we sit up and listen as attentively to the meaningful bits?
On top of the film’s themes of adoption and identity, Joy Ride also interrogates the power of friendship in all its different forms. At their big point of conflict, with their personalities in friction more than ever, Lolo and Audrey question if they truly are friends - or did they only ever bond because they were the only two Asian girls in the entire town? Do they really have anything else in common?
And then there’s the tropes of the “properly behaved” Asian female, which can consign (and confine) women into a box that suffocates their personality. That plays into story points like Lolo’s vagina-centric artwork, Deadeye’s refusal to wear feminine clothes, and Kat concealing her sexual freedom from her fiancé. “There are so many stereotypes of Asians being polite or following the rules,” says Hsu. “What I do love about the assignment of Joy Ride is that the film is meant to be really sex-positive, body-positive, just raunch-positive, and subvert all the tropes that have ever been placed upon us.”
Fully on board, or disagree big time? We’d love to hear your take. Leave a review to share your thoughts with the good.film community!
Yes, there are universal themes (and laughs) here that anyone can enjoy. But Joy Ride feels like the comic continuation of a particularly undeniable triumph for the Asian American community. Everything Everywhere All at Once and Crazy Rich Asians have both achieved huge amounts of critical and commercial success in recent years, showing studio executives that Asian stories can and do sell.
While Joy Ride does break barriers for Asian American representation, the movie is about more than on-screen diversity. Where the film differs in its shock-value stylings is its freedom to depict a newly modern kind of story: about women who can be just as unhinged, impulsive and sex-positive (okay, sex crazed) as anybody else. When that’s served in a wrapper of racial identity, it cuts through in a deeper way.
Steph Hsu shares an anecdote to back that up: “We just had a screening in San Francisco, mostly an Asian American audience, and people were just scream-laughing at these jokes that are so culturally specific that if you know, you know. So it felt incredibly cathartic. It feels amazing to make fun of ourselves.”
If dismantling stereotypes is your jam, then, Joy Ride could be much more meaningful than just a night out with a few belly laughs. “This film, at its core, is about belonging, and we just happen to be Asian,” says Sherry Cola. “We're touching on a lot of universal themes and normalising the fact that we deserve to tell these stories our own way, and reclaim our identities.”