Double bill of Asian coming-of-age stories scores high
It may not have Barbenheimer-level implications, but Hong Kong screens are getting an end-of-summer face-off of two films that are, at least on the surface, polar opposites. At one end of the spectrum is Yuzuru Tachikawa's animated manga adaptation about a jazz-mad kid from Sendai, Blue Giant. At the other is Adele Lim's girls' road trip raunch-com, Joy Ride. Ultimately both are about young people in search of direction, identity and fulfillment, and who learn what true friendship is along the way. All that is fine and generic, and entirely inoffensive, but Blue Giant's stellar soundtrack and Joy Ride's singular point-of-view lift the films well above the tried and tested.
Blue Giant is an old-fashioned narrative, about a country kid going to the big city to realize their dreams. After getting a saxophone as a gift, teenaged Dai Miyamoto (voiced by Yuki Yamada) heads to Tokyo to learn more about jazz and play in the city's elite clubs. Dai wants to be the best. He crashes on his friend Tamada's (Amane Okayama) sofa and eventually draws him into a trio as its drummer, along with superstar pianist Sawabe (Shotaro Mamiya). The band is christened Jass. But Tamada is a beginner, whereas Sawabe is a perfectionist who's got his own baggage that's holding band Jass back.
Blue Giant isn't perfect. Some of its multiple animation styles were clearly sacrificed to budget. The 3D motion-capture renderings are vivid and tactile, immersing audiences in the moment. The use of impressionistic sketch art illustrates the challenges Jass faces. The wide, 2D filler sequences, however, of club patrons and long shots of Jass on stage, for example, demonstrate the constraints the animators were under.
But then all that is entirely forgivable, thanks to composer Hiromi Uehara's propulsive, eclectic score, which deserves theatrical surround sound. Ultimately, this is a film about music.
Joy Ride does for Asian-American women what Girls Trip did for Black women. It gives them an authentic, modern voice, enriched by its cultural specificity and yet universally recognizable. The story revolves around high-powered lawyer Audrey (Ashley Park, Emily in Paris) heading to Beijing on important business. Tagging along is artist pal Lolo (Sherry Cola), whom she's known since childhood, and Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), the K-pop-obsessed cousin no one really wants there. In China they meet up with her college friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All At Once), a successful TV actress. When work demands Audrey seek out her Chinese birth mother - she was adopted - they hit the road with varying degrees of disaster.
Malaysian-born Lim cut her teeth producing and writing for television and made the leap to film, adapting Crazy Rich Asians and penning Raya and the Last Dragon. Along with comedy writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao (both worked on Family Guy), Lim touches on identity, expectation, agency, sexuality and community. These four Chinese women don't know how to be Chinese in China. Kat has no idea how to handle a fiance who would disapprove of her sexually active college days. Lolo calls Audrey racist for never dating an Asian man and being "more white" than the rest of them. When the complicated truth of Audrey's birth is discovered, the script goes down an entirely different road and dabbles (not deeply enough though) in inter-Asian relations and historical hostilities. It's surprisingly intense stuff for a film that also features one of the most explicit, honest and hilarious bedroom screen trysts in recent years.
Like Blue Giant, Joy Ride isn't perfect either. It relies on the predictable beats of the road-trip comedy, and the second-act betrayals that are always forgiven in the third. In the end, though, the characters and situations ring true, which only adds to the comedy, something too many "funny" movies forget to do.
