Director: Adele Lim. Starring: Ashley Park, Stephanie Hsu, Sherry Cola, Sabrina Wu.
To me, the main characters of Adele Lim’s Joy Ride feel like the harbinger of a new imagination. In defiance of the patriarchal umbrella I grew stunted under, the Asian female and non-binary leads in Joy Ride defy fetishization. I'll elaborate: they defy the myth of the petite, submissive, wide-eyed, nacreous-skinned nymphomaniac who looks thirteen but is actually 30. Or, as a friend once put it, Asian female stereotypes are “a pedophile’s wet dream." In Joy Ride, Lolo, Audrey, Kat, and Deadeye have bodies that take up space and misbehave. They are loud, vulgar, aggressive, appetitive and neurodivergent, and it doesn’t matter! Because they are the ones choosing; the men are chosen. After growing up with a Chinese mom who told me I should have a flat stomach like my diminutive cousins, and having several ex-boyfriends with Asian fetishes, seeing Asian American actresses on-screen who don’t have eating disorder-inducing insectile waistlines was powerful.
Beauty is the prerogative of men in this film – the leads are free to have other concerns, like K-POP, snacks, sexual gratification, or finding one’s birth mom… a.k.a. the project of being human. As my eyes lingered over the nude torso and wind-swept hair of Stephanie Hsu’s bible-thumping-virgin-fiancé (Desmond Chiam) and the lusty basketball team that hosts the main characters after a white American woman frames them for smuggling drugs, I felt rakishly emboldened. After watching decades of films catering to the male gaze, Joy Ride felt like it was centering my Chinese-American female gaze. It’s a joyfully over-the-top counter-point to centuries worth of cultural rape, wherein the oppressor coerces the oppressed into abandoning their own perspective until they genuinely perceive themselves as repellently ugly. (For example, double eyelid surgery inspired by Western physical ideals).
Yes, Joy Ride lacks subtlety and a meticulous plot line. The ending is a cheesy denouement. But who cares? Leave the weighty complex pessimism to other genres. Joy Ride is a masterpiece of the raunchy sex comedy genre, and a simple flipping of double-standards and pervasive power structures gives the genre a fresh face. For an hour and thirty-two minutes, Joy Ride will substitute the terror of life with a cardiovascular workout’s worth of raucous cachinnation.
P.S. to “cachinnate” is to laugh loudly and immoderately