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Luck is a peculiar concept. Winning the lottery is lucky, but so too is it the traditional thing to say when the bus that could have killed you merely breaks every bone in your body. Lloyd Lee Choi’s compassionate, absorbing, sometimes agonizing “Lucky Lu” deals exclusively in the latter type — the tough luck of the narrow escape and the near miss, which doesn’t manifest in sudden windfalls but in the paltry miracle of bad circumstances not being so much worse. Whatever lucky star Choi’s characters must thank, it’s a dim one, usually obscured by clouds and skyscrapers.
Not that there’s much time for anyone here to look up; far down below the skyline, on the streets of New York City, Chinese immigrant Lu (Chang Chen) works tirelessly as a delivery bike rider. After five years of separation from his family back home, he has scraped together enough money to rent a small apartment, which his friend Bo Hao (Haibin Li) is passing on to him. So Lu has sent for his wife Si Yu (Fala Chen) and little daughter Yaya (Carabelle Manna Wei) who have just received their papers and are flying in the next day. Lu is the stoic type, but there’s palpable anticipation in his manner as he gives them a Facetime tour of their new digs. Yaya has heard that all American families have a dog. Lu points his phone at the foggy unplugged aquarium and promises her a fish instead.
The first blow falls while Si Yu and Yaya are in the air, when Lu discovers that Bo Hao has disappeared after pocketing his deposit and rent payment rather than delivering it to the landlord as promised. He is given a day to come up with that amount again, or his family will be arriving to no home at all. The second cruel development occurs when Lu’s bike — now his only means of paddling out of debt creek — is stolen while he’s making a routine drop-off. Unable to work, Lu pawns, begs, cajoles and eventually resorts to petty theft himself, but it hardly makes a dent. Then his wife and kid arrive.
Keeping all his worries from them — but not so much from Yaya (or Queenie as she has chosen to be called in America) who is more observant than he realizes — Lu’s increasingly desperate trail around New York with his solemn-faced little girl in tow becomes a kind of odyssey against adversity. But as the screws tighten, Choi’s compassionate script ensures that even those individuals who have most injured Lu are not so much villains as fellow victims of a system that oppresses by pitting them against one another. Even Bo Hao, whom Lu eventually tracks down, is revealed to have committed his betrayal only to pay his gravely ill mother’s medical bills. “Did you know they charge for the ambulance here?” he asks piteously.
Norm Li’s photography perfectly suits the tone, neither romancing the locations of Lu’s life nor making them look condescendingly squalid. And his aesthetic keeps pace with Brendan Mills’ excellent editing, in changing mood from the jittery, quick-cut, handheld first half to a steadier, more contemplative last act as Lu’s treks across the boroughs become longer and slower and exhaustion begins to set in. In this latter mode, though, there is also space for sudden moments of lyricism. In particular, in one lovely, deeply moving passage we follow Lu but hear in voiceover a monologue from Auntie Yang, an old friend who is taking care of Queenie while Lu runs another hail-Mary errand. She describes how close they all used to be and how different Lu was when he first arrived, with the ambition to open a restaurant that they all invested in, before it failed. Suddenly the tightly coiled, hollow-cheeked, chain-smoking Lu’s borderline masochistic self-discipline becomes more understandable. He is a man riven with shame at past failure and beset by a heartrending melancholy at the foolishness of ever letting himself dream so big.
We can read all this into Lu because of the wonderfully restrained turn from Chang Chen, the Taiwanese star of major films from Edward Yang, Ang Lee, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Wong Kar-Wai. Given his pedigree, he might have treated “Lucky Lu” as the kind of vehicle that is built to give a big star some indie cred, but there is no showboating here, just a profound investment in the humanity of a character who barely allows himself a moment to be human, let alone to ponder his luck. Because for people like Lu — the workers, the strivers, the Dreamers who do not have time to dream — it is indeed a relative concept, rarely a stroke of good fortune, often at best a brief reprieve from bad. And sometimes it’s just a fleeting moment of grace in an otherwise chaotic day, like when a passing shaft of sunlight illuminates a small room in which everyone you love is safe, and for just a moment, you feel like the luckiest guy on earth.
English (US) ·