Lucky

Saddled with as deliberate a pace as one could envision, Lucky ultimately establishes itself as a well made yet wholly uninvolving piece of work that does, at least, feature a fantastic performance at its center. The storyline follows the title character (Sihle Dlamini), a young boy who goes to live with his uncle in the city after his mother dies – though it quickly becomes clear that said uncle wants nothing to do with the boy. Lucky instead winds up befriending a crotchety old Indian woman (Jayashree Basavra’s Padma), and the film essentially documents the unlikely friendship that inevitably ensues between the pair. It’s a tremendously familiar premise that rarely feels as conventional or hackneyed as it might have, as filmmaker Avie Luthra’s pervasively subdued sensibilities ensure that Lucky comes off as a low-key character study more than anything else. This is despite the fact that, in the final analysis, we really don’t learn a whole lot about Dlamini’s quiet character, though Dlamini does a superb job of transforming Lucky into a figure worthy of the viewer’s interest and sympathy. It is, as such, obvious that the movie fares best when focused on the growing bond between Lucky and Padma, as the film is otherwise suffused with elements that feel as though they’ve been included solely to pad out the running time – as scripters Tanya Welz and Luthra subject the protagonist with one misfortune after another (eg he’s kicked out school, he encounters a gang of homeless kids, etc, etc). The revelation that Luthra has expanded the film from a short ultimately comes as little surprise, and there’s finally no labeling Lucky as anything more than a well-intentioned failure.

** out of ****