Joy Ride is a free-wheeling, filthy, outrageously high-energy road trip comedy starring Emily in Paris’s Ashley Park as overachiever Audrey, adopted by a white American couple, now about to make partner in a Waspy law firm. She needs to close a deal in Beijing but, speaking no Mandarin, recruits drop-out artist friend Lolo (comedian Sherry Cola), non-binary oddball Deadeye (stand-up Sabrina Wu) and Chinese superstar actress Kat (Everything Everywhere’s Stephanie Hsu) – three big mistakes.
The resulting Bridesmaids/Hangover set pieces include chaotic threesomes, inadvertent drug smuggling, disastrous drinking games and a superb K-Pop version of WAP ending with some genuinely touching scenes of discovery and identity. It’s a popcorn summer comedy about four chaotic horny messes trying not to mess things up and failing.
So what? Writer and director Adele Lim, who penned Crazy Rich Asians, wanted to call Joy Ride the Joy Fuck Club, “because I was fed up with those films about suffering and honour and Asian women as delicate wives and mothers,” she explains. The Malaysia-born mother of two turned down the Crazy Rich Asians sequel after being offered one-tenth the salary of her white male co-writer and penned this script with friends Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao. “We’ve been writing other people’s stories most of our careers,” she explains. “This time we took the messiest, nastiest stories inspired by our Asian friends and heightened them.”
Puerile or political? Puerile is political in Hollywood. A 2021 study from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media reviewed the top 10 grossing films each year from 2010 to 2019 and found just 4.5 per cent of the main cast members were Asian and 75 per cent of those were in supporting roles. The vast majority of East Asian women of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese descent were “lotus blossoms”, innocent girls who are sexually available, or “dragon ladies” who use their femininity to deceive men.
Surely not. A producer once told Lim in a meeting “I look at you and think ‘dragon lady with a nail salon who might be human trafficking’…”
It’s about time. Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Oscar haul, Netflix’s hit with Beef, plus shows and films like American Born Chinese, Elemental and Honour Student have seen Asian American film-makers take the reins and, this year, US cinema going has been highest among young, Hispanic/Latino and Asian audiences.
Are you saying Ashley Park vomiting on camera is progress? Gay British actor Russel Tovey once said: “I yearn for a part where I play someone gay who doesn’t wake up every morning saying ‘oh my god I’m so gay.’” Joy Ride’s comedy isn’t an Asian comedy. It’s just comedy.
High risk venture. “It’s the first time that we are putting four Asian faces in the middle of an R-rated comedy,” says Lim. “If you fuck up — if a project with a queer lead, a Black lead or an Asian lead fails — the industry’s knee-jerk reaction is to blame it on the otherness. You don’t want that fear to paralyse you and keep you from creating from a place of joy.”
At cinemas from 4 August.
Photograph Ed Araquel/ Lionsgate
