Lucky Lu – a man reliant on the gig economy comes close to losing everything – Belfast Film Festival #bff25

Less than a month ago, Queen’s Film Theatre screened the superb Souleymane’s Story about a Guinean refugee who works as a food delivery rider in Paris while waiting for the outcome of his protracted asylum claim. Director Boris Lojkine’s tale (cowritten with Delphine Agut) is one of being taken advantage of at every corner, and ends up focussing on the structural problems with the French asylum process and how that drives migrants into a shadow economy where profiles on delivery apps are rented and more than half the takings are withheld. Parts of the lead actor’s own experience of coming to France were written into the script and the success of the film seems linked to Abou Sangaré being invited by the French government to apply – his fourth time of trying – for residency.

Lloyd Lee Choi’s feature debut Lucky Lu covers a lot of similar territory. This time, Lu Jia Cheng has a visa to work in the US. But his original restaurant business failed and he’s been forced to work as a delivery rider to raise the funds to rent an apartment that will allow his wife and daughter to fly from Asia to join him in New York.

Over two days we witness his entire livelihood collapsing like a takeaway falling through the bottom of a thin plastic bag and the food spreading over the pavement, unable to be recovered into something edible. Lu falls onto a catastrophe curve that only goes one direction. While his family are in mid-air, his e-bike is stolen in the first of a series of losses. No bike means no rented profile on the delivery company’s app, no bike deposit, no income stream, no deposit and rent for the new flat, and soon his physical health is joining his poor mental wellbeing in the gutter. Lu’s life seems to have gone beyond a point of no return into a wasteland beyond precarious.

Chang Chen portrays an utterly broken man who doesn’t know how he’ll get through to the end of the day, never mind find a way of surviving the next. He veers between desolation and depression, with a gaunt face reflecting his undereating. “I’ll pay you back soon – I give you my word” won’t pay an apartment deposit in the morning. People let him down, yet he carries the deep shame of having let other people down in the past.

Less than a day after the film begins, his young daughter Yaya (Carabelle Manna Wei) arrives in New York and the film pivots to experience America through her eyes. Out of the mouth of babes comes many home truths. Her finely tuned emotional intelligence senses that father Lu is not well. The pair spend a full day together, tearing across the city almost heroically trying to raise funds that will surely never meet his immediate needs.

The people Lu meets fall into two categories: those who are tough but end up showing him limited amounts of kindness, and those who are just out to rip him off. Sometimes it’s hard to determine which category characters will fall into. And the challenge to Lu is which camp he will fall into as he discovers the easiest way to make money is by stealing bikes and inflicting pain on other people for his own meagre reward. At one point little Yaya offers a way of making some easy cash and it challenges Lu to consider whether to drag her into his dangerous pursuits.

A glimmer of hope – a physical ray of light – is proffered at the film’s conclusion. But it seems like a false promise. Crawling out of one hole will only lead to landing in another pothole a day or two later. Can the presence of his wife and the restoring love of his daughter materially change the family’s luck?

Lucky Lu is an incredible first feature written and directed by Lloyd Lee Choi. It combines well rounded characterisation with some superb acting to go beyond documenting the gig economy’s exploitation of overseas workers to explore to what lengths people under pressure will go to survive.

Another great screening as part of Belfast Film Festival which continues until Saturday 8 November.

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