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The Key Story of Women’s Discoveries Of Attractions

A direct Chinese housewife coerces a long-estranged gay friend who has been in CHICKS LOVE CHICKS with her since large school to destroy her harsh husband, is thepremise of Hiroki Ryuichi’s” Ride or Die.” And yet from the start it feels like we’re missing a couple vital details in the fine print of what’s going on around- there’s something virtually proper fluttering beneath all this incorrect.

The manipulation is so blatant that it bends all the way backwards to reflect its own kind of ineffable truth. Nanae ( Sato Honami ) might offer her sex to Rei ( Mizuhara Kiko ). There’s a sharp sense of intimacy between these two females, even as it becomes painfully obvious that Nanae won’t be able to hold up her end of the bargain any time soon ( she strips dressed in her Tokyo room showing Rei a system with new wounds on her base). Even this merely looks predatory from the outside. Perhaps folks are interpersonal animals by character. In a world where they have both gained a lot from each other, Nanae and Rei may also realize they have something of value to each other after more than a decade of separation.

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Whatever the show’s best insights may remain( and you better believe that mileage may vary ),” Walk or Die” doesn’t lead audiences towards them by any obvious road. By the time this endearingly non-prescriptive slab of pulp fiction even reaches the stretch of a title card, which appears at the end of a bloody 28-minute prologue that echoes everything from” The Postman Always Rings Twice” to” Thelma & Louise,” it is obvious that Netflix’s most recent Asian slow-burn isn’t following the path of any particular narrative tradition, especially of the soft-hearted Yuri stories that Hiroki’s source

A much-needed change of pace from the genre of contemporary cinema that reduces every story to its moral arithmetic, Chicks Love Chicks and a welcome refresh for the same-minded viewers who watch movies in the same way, is the” Ride or Die” adaptation of Nakamura Ching’s well-known manga series” Gunj.” It’s a shaggy and distended portrait of friendship that pinballs through time as freely as it does between genres, and a few too many of the 140-minute story’s frequent detours wind up in dead ends, but” Ride or Die” retains enough forward momentum to roll across even its least successful chapters because of how stubbornly Hiroki refuses to keep score between these characters.

Rei’s first impression strikes us as being jackknifed into the deep end despite not knowing how to swim. She approaches a married salaryman, asks him for a drink he’s too horny to ask, and forces him to take her to his hotel-like apartment. The handheld camera follows her down into the bowels of a half-empty Tokyo nightclub as Mizuhara ( an actress and fashion model who some viewers might recognize from her stint as a local sidekick on” Queer Eye: We’re in Japan” ) adds a queasy seasickness to her natural runway stride.

Rei only breaks down about her terms when she is naked next to Nanae’s husband:” Give me your wife. He rebores, and her inner Aba Sade emerges as she jet-sprayed him with jet-sand and slashes the man’s jugular open. It’s not the last time that” Ride or Die” seems like a strange title for a movie that doesn’t force anyone to choose between the two. The murder is a clumsy one that was captured on a dozen different cameras, and Nanae is aware that Rei loves her enough to spend the rest of her life alone in jail for a killing they conceived together. In a version of this story, Nanae might hang Rei out for dry.

For all we know, that might have been what Nanae was trying to do when she called her ex-boyfriend out of the blue and began to prey on the kind of obsession that money cannot purchase. She intercepts Rei on her way to the police station, and the two embark on a fugitive road trip into the past with the fuzz hot on their tail. However, Nanae, who Sato gives her the sunken volatility of a person who was raised poor enough to understand how far their power travels, can’t quite bring herself to allow Rei to fall.

Riding or Die’s setup reads familiar, but it can be quickly changed with the help of enough residual teenage energy and lopsided sexual friction, which is ideal for a movie that prefers to switch things around rather than risk spending a few minutes in neutral. They’re not blithely sociopathic- of all the things this movie is not,” Natural Born Killers” is at the top of the list- but they’re living inside the fairy tale bond they were never allowed to nurture in real life. Nanae and Rei sing along to their favorite high school songs, such as” Lovefool” by The Cardigans and” CHE,” but instead they act like a couple of old friends who are on an overdue girls ’ trip. R. R. Y (” Yui” ) and fast food are served and joke about their corpses blowing up.

Sometimes old memories take hold in the form of long flashbacks as these women finally get to compare notes about the secret histories they’ve never been able to share with anyone else. Rei is uncovered that she was raised in a wealthy family that refused to accept her sexuality, while Nanae was the result of a poor, broken home, and faced the consequences of having to sell her body from a young age, first as a famous athlete and then as a wealthy man’s wife. ” It is pointless to rob you of a few precious days of freedom only to savor your most pressing emotions.” It’s something that Rei pitied about Nanae even as she tried to buy her friend for herself. Rei’s first reaction when the women appear to be approaching the end of the road is to look her in the eyes and yell,” You could at least let me fuck you first!” Ride or Die doesn’t shy away from this dynamic, neither from the possibility that two people might need each other for very different reasons, nor from the potentially unflattering logistics that might arise.

” Ride or Die” avails itself to that raw kind of truth-telling even when it’s ugly, and the film is unfailingly honest even when it isn’t sure how to express itself. Two of Nakamura’s most intriguing characters are stranded in an odd limbo that suggests, if only for a moment, that the manga should have been turned into a TV series, while another thread involving a duplicitous taxi driver adds yet another layer of darkness to a film that is desperate for some fresh rays of light.

However, such messiness is both a feature and a bug in a film about two lost souls who are unsure of where they are going and why they can only travel together ( the movie’s understandably weak attempts to explain the origins of Rei’s with Nanae make for some of its weakest scenes ). Right at the moment when it seems like” Ride or Die” might run out of gas, someone drops by to remind us how powerful it can be when people let their most primal emotions take the wheel, and how much stories can oversimplify things when they force instincts to explain themselves like choices.

The long and winding road trip makes this one-hour long and ultimately worthwhile because” Ride or Die” is not a goal-oriented romance and it might not even be one. There’s something irresistibly beautiful about seeing people discover their own value, even if it can only be measured in their own private currency, but the last few scenes here are too good to spoil for the same reason they’re too fraught and complicated to explain. Sato and Mizuhara’s abrasive chemistry only grows stronger as the film moves along ( it was shot in sequence and during COVID, though you only sense the former ), and the heartrending accord they reach as the sun rises on the final act pays off the various cruelties and cul-de-sacs that Hiroki drives through on the way there.

B+ grade