Present Confusion Reviews | Ride or Die (a.k.a. 彼女; 2021)

 note: spoilers.

At around the end of the first third of Ryuichi Hiroki's Ride or Die, Lovefool by the Cardigans starts to play. The song - the lead single off of the 1996 album First Band on the Moon - reveals its true nature when one looks at the lyrics, which contrast with its bubblegum aesthetic. It's a song about a person desperately struggling to keep someone in their life, whether that other party likes it or not. The song goes:

I don't care if you really care

As long as you don't go

So I cry, I pray, and I beg

Love me, love me

Say that you love me

This isn't a song about longing, Lovefool is a song about a need for codependence on a level that approaches obsession. One may hardly call it love at all - and that's the kind of feeling that embodies Ride or Die, an adaptation of Ching Nakamura's manga Gunjou. Hiroki, with a script penned by Nakamura herself and frequent collaborator Nami Yoshikawa, trims out a lot of the fat from the original manga but keeps the spirit of the manga intact.

The movie begins with a dizzying half hour sequence where Rei Nagasawa (Kiko Mizuhara) kills a married man after a tryst at a bar. This man turns out to be the husband of her former highschool classmate Nanae (Honami Sato). Nanae is the victim of domestic abuse, and Rei takes it upon herself to kill her husband. Before this murder, Rei has lived an otherwise ordinary, even happy life: she lives with her older girlfriend and works as a successful plastic surgeon. But her infatuation with Nanae, something that has continued from her high school days, leads her to throw all that away.

The murder serves as the bloody exclamation point to an extended, explicit sex scene between Rei and her victim. For people who know Kiko Mizuhara through, say, her guesting stint on Queer Eye, the proceedings may be a bit shocking, to say the least. Hiroki is no stranger to scenes like this in his movies; before moving to the mainstream, he worked as a director in pinku eiga in a variety of subgenres such as S&M, and was even one of the early pioneers of the sub subgenre of gay themed pinku eiga. But to call the film's scenes sexploitation is in my opinion, unfair; in my opinion all such scenes in this film serve as subversion and don't read as titillating at all. Hiroki's work isn't shy about sex or sexuality, but he also manages to craft emotionally complex characters (especially women) whose motivations lie in a large morally gray area.

Perhaps one of the biggest moments of this subversion of the male lens is in the subsequent bathroom scene, where both Rei and Nanae strip off their clothes, the former does so to wash off the blood off her body, and the latter to show the bruises and wounds she has gained over the years. The camera lingers over their bodies in a panning shot which wouldn't be unusual in a gravure video, but here the desired effect is unsettling, framing their bodies as canvasses of violence. At the same time, the scene serves as a moment of extreme vulnerability for both women. The confrontation that follows is probably one of the best acted moments of the film, an amazing performance from Mizuhara, who has flown under the radar with her movie roles in the past few years, and Sato, who is perhaps better known as the drummer for indie rock band Gesu no Kiwami Otome.

The relationship between Rei and Nanae isn't a romance in the normal sense, if it could be called love at all: although it is a bit more ambiguous in the film, Nanae in the manga is straight, and cannot reciprocate Rei's affection, at least in the way Rei wants. Whatever kindness Rei gives her is rebuffed or met with aloofness or hostility, because due to her history and self-loathing, she is unable to process the love she receives. Rei desires Nanae, and would do anything for her sake, but this love is unrequited. She is also troubled by a sense of insecurity and inadequacy. Like in Lovefool, she is consumed by a desire for codependence that she cannot shake off. Perhaps it is better to say that they need each other rather than love each other, and that they often cope with that neediness in self-destructive ways. For Rei, it manifests as a moment where she engages in casual sex with another man, a moment that serves more as an act of self harm than an act done for her own satisfaction.

These are two strangers that, in the words of the manga, are neither lovers nor friends. The nature of their relationship can be seen as transactional: one offering services to the other in exchange for something else. The journey that the film takes us through oscillates between tender moments of gentle reflection and table-turning hysterics. But by the end of the film, this relationship evolves when both Nanae and Rei consummate their bottled up feelings and come into a twisted sort of understanding: that sometimes, when all we have left is each other, that's all we really ever need.