Girls Just Wanna Be Weird: A Spotlight on Female-Lead Comedies
One of the best trends to really take off in the past decade or so is the rise of female-led comedies that dive headfirst into the weirdness and the uncomfortable reality of being a woman. Whether it’s competition between friends or navigating the complicated and often contradictory world of sexuality, comedic films made by and starring women are really finding their loud-mouthed footing and hitting their deranged stride.
Starting with the classic genre of road movies, Joy Ride (2023) centers on two childhood friends Aubrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) during a period of transition. Aubrey is looking to move onward and upward with her life and Lolo is just enjoying everything as is: making unsettlingly sex-positive art and living in a studio on Aubrey’s property. During a business trip to China, they are joined by Lolo’s odd cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and meet up with Aubrey’s college friend Kat (Stephanie Hsu) who lives in Beijing and works as a TV actor. Scene after scene, it seems like nothing can go right and these very disparate personalities clash over everything. As most bawdy comedies are wont to do, this one tumbles headfirst into capers, wild situations, and people hiding drugs in their bodily orifices. Funny story: a title being considered for this movie was “The Joy Fuck Club,” a title that I for one think would have been a great idea.
Joy Ride is a movie that speaks not only to comedies headed by women but an interesting perspective that’s been making more and more appearances: adults adopted as children exploring their origins. Like Return to Seoul where a French-raised adoptee seeks a sense of her homeland, Joy Ride delves into the drawbacks and rewards of finding where one comes from. Audrey was raised by a standard suburban white couple that she loves to no end but while in China, Lolo pushes her to find her birth mother. Jokes are made throughout the film by Lolo and her family about Aubrey not being Chinese enough and, to some extent, it’s more important to Lolo than Aubrey that she sees this mission through. When Aubrey is told that her mother is deceased and wasn’t technically Chinese, she’s even more tangled up about who she’s supposed to be. In a time when identity is of the utmost importance to people, these narratives about adopted adults feeling like they don’t exist in either category are particularly poignant. The question of what are our roots and what do they mean becomes extra loaded when others claim they know yours.
Much less transitory is the super stylized and awfully gay Please Baby Please (2022). Everyone wants to be weird in this movie, not just the girls. Suze (Andrea Riseborough) and Arthur (Harry Melling) are a beatnik couple who witness a biker gang murder someone – an act that intrigues Suze more than disgusts her. Terry (Karl Glusman), the leader of the gang, catches Arthur’s eye and Suze can’t help but notice how the two of them look at each other. The couple move through their bohemian life discussing gender roles and sex, attending overly earnest poetry readings, and aggressively asking their friends strange personal questions. All the while, Arthur obsesses over Teddy and Suze has wild fantasies about being branded and choking out members of the biker gang.
Fantasy can only take one so far. Naturally, Suze and Arthur start to put their new desires into action with Arthur seeking Teddy out at a bar and Suze discovering the public delights of a porno theater. The couple gets increasingly tangled up with violence and this seedy underbelly they’re both seeking out until their lives are enmeshed. The gang takes over their apartment, robs their neighbors, and mocks Arthur’s inability to stand up for himself or protect his home and wife. The only way this is resolved is when the couple’s upstairs neighbor Maureen (a fabulous but underutilized Demi Moore) shoots one of the gang members, while Suze closes out the movie in a split screen shot where she’s dressed like Teddy and her husband passionately kisses the gang member as she watches.
Huge swaths of Please Baby Please are people discussing what gender really is, what sex means, and what is expected of them from society. Suze has some of the best moments when she rails against the idea of being a woman, screaming quotes from Stanley Kowalski and baiting people into answering her probing, personal questions. There’s also a singing drag queen weeping in a phone booth, and plenty of moments that mock the concept of being “a real man” (or woman, for that matter), especially with the hyper-sexualized Teddy. Suze and Maureen become flipsides of the same coin as Maureen tries to prove herself independent while being ultra feminine and Suze cross-dresses, bellows, and behaves like a teeny tiny version of Marlon Brando. The weirdness here doesn’t stem just from the women, as this entire film is pretty whacky, but the women drive it forward and revel unapologetically in it.
Moving from stylized modern films in love with the sixties greaser aesthetic to stylized 90’s movies hitting the same visual notes, we have Mod Fuck Explosion (1994). See, Joy Ride? You can have ‘fuck’ in the title. Just don’t expect anyone outside of us weirdos to see it.
Mod Fuck Explosion is a San Francisco based, low budget flick that follows the underworld odyssey of a teenager named London (Amy Davis). She’s drawn to a rival biker gang composed of Asian members in leather jackets while her normal group is a handful of slickly dressed mods. London ponders life, wanders the city, and argues with her friends. The rival gangs eventually clash in a wild rumble but London continues on her way, as aimless as she ever was.
Though not nearly an intricate or globe-spanning as the first two movies covered, Mod Fuck Explosion is a tightly made trip of a film that teeters between parody and genuine imitation. Director Jon Moritsugu, husband of Amy Davis, plays the leader of the Asian gang Kazumi and has his dialogue dubbed despite being a native English speaker. Small details like that and montage moments that come out of and lead to nowhere give this entire movie a surreal quality but it stays in line with its story and creates a portrait of alienation in an effortless way. London has people like her in her life and circle; she’s drawn to a group unlike her at all. Like most of us, she doesn’t quite know where she fits but also doesn’t really seem like she’s a square peg.
The movie is surprisingly tender and the love Moritsugu has for Davis comes through in the treatment of London. Her whims, her angst, her rambling internal monologues aren’t portrayed as frivolous or just the trappings of a teen girl. She is a genuine and confused character, even in the moments when we’re sort of laughing at what’s happening to her.
Women and girls have finally gotten the chance to be weird. We can see early examples of women taking on gross-out humor or being the full-throated freak character in films but the heyday is truly upon us. With female directors, writers, and actors of all stripes taking the helm and the challenge, I suspect we’ll be seeing more of these movies, funny and serious both, soon. After all, the future is female… weirdos.
