One could argue that it speaks to the humanistic timelessness of The Bicycle Thieves that it just keeps getting remade, with the circumstances adapted to the present day. Then again, its evergreen nature also speaks to humanity’s failures, given that the social ills that de Sica observed in post-war Italy have not improved — and arguably have gotten worse. Lucky Lu, the debut feature from Lloyd Lee Choi, pretty much follows that 1948 template to the letter, and on a formal level it accomplishes very little else. This film is simple and direct. So if you appreciated the mid-aughts social realism of Ramin Bahrani but felt those films were a bit too subtle or abstruse, well, you’re in luck.
Lu (Chang Chen), however, most certainly is not. We meet him as he is putting down the first month’s rent and deposit on a new one-bedroom New York apartment. After several years, his wife Si Yu (Fala Chen) and little girl Yaya (Carabelle Manna) are emigrating from China to join him. Most of Lucky Lu takes place over a single harrowing day, with Lu trying to establish a home for his family to come to. Through phone calls and texts, we know that mother and child have left China on a flight to Seattle, and will soon arrive in New York from there. This creates a time crunch that means to, and to some extent does, ratchet up the anxiety.
Lu works as a delivery man for an Uber Eats-like app. He relies on his e-bike, which he rents from the company, in order to stay in the system and make his deliveries. You can see exactly where this is going. The bike is stolen, he pleads in vain for understanding from his boss, and just for an added kick in the pants, he discovers that the old friend Bo Hao (Haibin Li) who rented him the apartment was in no way authorized to do so. Lu handed the guy several thousand dollars in cash and now has nothing to show for it. Once Si Yu and Yaya arrive, Lu has to head back out to the street, trying to hustle for money from old acquaintances, sell any possessions that might carry some cash value, and hopefully secure another bike. Yaya joins him on these errands, which creates the exact same dynamic we saw between father and son in the de Sica film. Lu is at his lowest, tries to put on a brave face for his child, and only succeeds in losing face.
To be fair, Lucky Lu does have some effective moments. In adapting the post-theft sequence from Bicycle Thieves, where Antonio is practically taunted by the proliferation of bicyclists across Rome, we see Lu observing his fellow gig-economy hustlers, people he probably never noticed before. To add a smartphone-era twist, we hear the constant chirping of the app, signaling to Lu that there’s another order waiting, one that he is incapable of picking up. There’s also a cultural specificity to Lucky Lu that creates certain kinds of frisson that the original could not. Lu is proud but desperate, and we learn that he tried to open a restaurant several years before. His brother Zhang (Perry Fung) and sister-in-law (Fiona Fu) invested with Lu and lost quite a bit of money. Anyone who has ever been the poor relation in their family — one old friend remarks, “I only ever see you when you need something” — will experience guilty pangs of familiarity.
If Lucky Lu is finally a bit of a disappointment, hardly terrible but ultimately not all that good, the main reason is that Chang, one of the premiere actors of his generation, is given very little to do. Lu is noble but not above lying, diligent but not especially smart, and he is clearly a loving family man. But considering that Lu is front and center for almost the entire film, we learn very little about his interior life. As is too often the case when it comes to stories about the working poor, Lucky Lu is content to depict its protagonist as a human doing rather than a human being. We come away with an understanding that life is hard, but most of us already knew that.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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