Ride or Die
Two former school friends go on the run in a lesbian take of Thelma & Louise, Japanese-style.
Killing time: Kiko Mizuhara and Honami Sato
The title does not bode well. Even so, Ryūichi Hiroki’s adaptation of the manga title Gunjō is awash with artistic pretension. Yet it starts like something else completely. In one continuous, four-and-a-half-minute take, Hiroki's camera stares down a busy Tokyo street as a taxi pulls to a stop outside a nightclub. We then follow Rei (Kiko Mizuhara) as she enters the club and threads her way through the clientele until ending up at an empty counter. She orders herself a tequila, and then a second one for a man a few feet away. Cut. Rei obviously has an agenda, but unlike Carey Mulligan’s Cassie Thomas in Promising Young Woman, Rei gets more than a little tiddly before heading back to the gentleman’s luxury apartment. There’s no ambiguity in what follows, it being a graphic display of sex and violence in which Rei ends up drenched in the stranger’s blood. Ah, we think, we’re in Park Chan-wook territory and are about to be treated to a stylish, trashy display of Tarantino-esque exploitation, Japanese-style.
If only. Ride or Die then changes hue and thinks it’s Blue is the Warmest Colour, or some kind of art house thrill-ride what gone wrong. A sapphic In the Realm of the Senses? The problem is with the tone. And the credibility of the performances. Neither Mizuhara nor Honami Sato – as Rei’s love interest, Nanae – display the acting chops to make the viewer believe in or care for these two women, regardless of the psychological curveballs thrown at them. They laugh. They cry. They fight. But never with the conviction of real people.
Meanwhile, the film cuts back and forth across time with little explanation, trying to fill in the gaps, but merely leading to further bafflement. In spite of all the belated exposition, we never really learn who Rei is, other than she comes from substantial wealth. There are magnificent apartments and various properties, spectacular views of Tokyo and beyond, as Ride or Die veers into Thelma & Louise terrain but with quite a bit more on display than Brad Pitt’s abs.
Japanese men come off so badly that one might be forgiven for thinking that the director behind the camera is not a 67-year-old man (the prolific Hiroki). Yet the scenes of female disrobement feel voyeuristic, exploitative, pushing lesbian cinema back a decade or two. One might excuse it for such tonal shifts if it didn’t feel like it was slipping and sliding all over the place, while losing sight of its narrative urgency. It’s a lumbering shaggy dog of a movie, constantly trying to explain itself. But the smooching-by-candlelight music and urgent hand-held camerawork don’t belong in the same universe, let alone the same film. Both Kiko Mizuhara and Honami Sato are ludicrously pretty and the production is exquisitely mounted. But it isn’t until Anne Suzuki turns up as Rei’s sister-in-law that we are reminded what a good actress can deliver with very little to go on.
Original title: Kanojo.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Kiko Mizuhara, Honami Sato, Maki Yoko, Shinya Niiro, Shunsuke Tanaka, Anne Suzuki, Sara Minami, Yu Uemura.
Dir Ryūichi Hiroki, Pro Kaata Sakamoto and Haruo Umekawa, Screenplay Nami Kikkawa, Ph Tadashi Kuwabara, Pro Des Tomoyuki Maruo, Ed Minoru Nomoto, Music Koki Moriyama and Haruomi Hosono, Costumes Mizue Ishibashi.
Studio3 Inc./Thefool Inc.-Netflix.
142 mins. Japan. 2021. Rel: 15 April 2021. Available on Netflix. Cert. 18.
