elle singapore

Adele Lim is Ready to Get a Little Dirty

It’s hard for Adele Lim to pick the raunchiest part of her new film Joy Ride. Could it be the wild ménage à trois between one of the characters and two attractive men? Or the surprise tattoo revealed on a specific body part? It could be the scene where the main characters are struggling to hide drugs in the most indecent of places. 

“It definitely has to be what I call the “V-POV” [aka] the vaginal point of view shot for my contribution to cinema,” Lim laughs as she tells ELLE Singapore during the Joy Ride press tour. 

In Lim’s directorial debut, Joy Ride has a lot of salacious scenes, but all told through the eyes of the women and nonbinary characters. Lim, along with screenwriters  Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, didn’t want to contain herself and wanted to work against existing stereotypes of Asian women. “We just wanted to write what we knew was going to be super fun and blow the roof off the place and what we knew in our hearts to be true and inspired by some of our own experiences or our friends’ experiences. The wonderful thing about our movie is that we’re not backing down from our sexuality and our sensuality and our curiosity and playfulness. We are doing it from our point of view and on our own terms. If anything, there is a bit of objectification of the men because there’s a strong female gaze in this movie.”