Despite the bouncy title, “Lucky Star” is not your average holiday movie. When Hallmark movies are shot in Canada, they often feature Winnipeg’s small-town charm of a rustic romance and fluffy snowfall (as parodied, for example, in “The Mother and the Bear” (Johnny Ma, 2024)). Gillian McKercher, on the other hand, introduces the grit and desolation of Alberta to her first feature. In this salt-of-the-earth tale of gambling, deception, and familial discord, McKercher paints us a picture of a second-generation Asian Canadian family struggling to get by in the dead of winter.
“Lucky Star” follows the eponymous Lucky (played by Terry Chen), who works at a mobile refurbishment business to keep his family afloat. As a reformed gambler, he, just like everyone else, is just trying to get by on honest work. His wife, Noel (Olivia Cheng), works as a high-end tailor; his eldest daughter, Grace (Conni Miu), part-times as a shop assistant while attending university; and his youngest, Jenny (Summer Ly), begrudgingly participates in the Chinese language school she is so required to attend. As the long winter goes on, however, life tempts each family member with a short cut to end their prolonged financial and academic woes. And for Lucky, the call of the cards becomes almost impossible to resist as he increasingly slips into debt.
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Remarkably, Gillian McKercher paints an Asian Canadian world that is so assimilated that ethnicity takes a backseat to individualized interiority. References to the family’s Chinese heritage are far and few between. Festive gatherings are reserved for a local Cantonese restaurant, but Lucky’s family just as easily order Western take-out. Lion dances prance in the occasional insert, but at-home relations remains prominent. Lucky himself is tattooed, listens to R&B, and reaches catharsis in true North American fashion: not in church, but in the driver’s seat of his musty Mitsubishi. Instead of fantasizing about a distant Asian “homeland,” his eyes light up at talk of Las Vegas. He, and the cast of characters around him, are people first, and incidentally Asian second.
This approach is reminiscent of Randall Park’s comic adaptation “Shortcomings” (2023), which delves into the conflicted interior life of three millennial Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area. In both movies, Asian diaspora is not presented as a “model minority.” If anything, the characters are deliberately unlikeable. In “Shortcomings,” misogynist protagonist Ben Tagawa blames the world for his inability to pull women; in “Lucky Star,” the weak-willed members of Lucky’s family lie through their teeth to have their way. These movies actively resist the ennobled hero of the diasporic working class, for better or for worse – and are sure to get under your skin with their repeat failings.
At the same time, the fundamentally flawed character of Lucky and his household make them all the more relatable. The banality of Lucky’s losses are terrifyingly familiar. He delays paying his taxes, so he panics about a phone scam. His car gets towed. His interpersonal relationships with Noel and Grace peel back the ugliness of the domestic home life, and his long-established habits of impulsive borrowing strain decades-long friendships. Tinseled trees and snowdusted highways aside, “Lucky Star” piles up the mundane frustrations of everyday life – and the chilling desolation that accompanies suburban living.
Like many first features, “Lucky Star” is bold. McKercher’s unassuming slice-of-life look at Lucky’s predicament verges on the territory of cinema vérite. Terry Chen and Olivia Cheng do well to portray the iciness of their marital bond, and Conni Miu balances her role as mediator well. The dissonance between the characters presents a marked distance from other Asian diaspora dramas of the like. Unlike the bounciness and exaggerated drama of “Shortcomings” or “The Mother and the Bear,” or the sentimental sacrifices of “Riceboy Sleeps” (2022) or “Minari” (2020), “Lucky Star” leaves little to whimsy or exoticised fantasy – an increasingly rare element to Asian diaspora dramas as of late.
Overall, “Lucky Star” is not entirely enjoyable. In actuality, it is a rather masochistic watch, as it refuses to shake off the running undercurrent of frustration. In this way, this serious take makes the film all the more worth watching. McKercher pioneers a salt-of-the-earth drama – devoid of overblown melodrama, imaginative fantasy, or otherwise – about Chinese Canadian diaspora, in a way rarely seen before.
“Lucky Star” made its US premiere at Santa Barbara International Film Festival last week, after winning the Audience Favourite award in Alberta Feature. Its Canadian theatrical release will be in Spring 2025.
