There’s no shortage of earthy content in this deliberately outrageous directing debut from Crazy Rich Asians writer, Adele Lim. We see a close-up of an extremely intimate tattoo. We hear about a sex position called ‘the Eiffel Tower’ (it includes high fives; ew, I don’t think the French would approve). The big surprise? There’s more to Joy Ride than adults-only humour.
The central characters are four twentysomethings who get themselves into a jam, in China. Clenched lawyer, Audrey (Ashley Park), adopted as a baby by white Americans, is trying to close a deal in Beijing, hampered by the fact that she can only speak four words of Mandarin. Her two Chinese-American best friends, Sherry Cola’s Lolo and Stephanie Hsu’s Kat – along with Lolo’s K-Pop-obsessed cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), whose character is implied to be autistic – want to help Audrey pass as Chinese. But does our heroine need to meet her birth mother in order to truly “belong”?
