My Lucky Star (2013)
Zhang Ziyi, Leehom Wang, Terri Kwan. Directed by Dennie Gordon. Cantonese, mostly, with English subtitles.
My Lucky Star is a romantic comedy in costume as one of those blundering detective-spy movies like Get Smart or The Pink Panther. It’s a good idea I wouldn’t mind seeing Hollywood attempt with some of my favorite actors. Zhang Ziyi, who’s usually in straight dramas, gets the flirty, silly, dreamer-girl role in this one, and her screen presence makes up for a lot of bad story, most of the time. Every time I thought I had seen just about enough of a meaningless, uninteresting plot, I was caught by little moments of genuine humor, so I finished it over the course of four sittings spread out over four months.
Zhang plays Sophie. She answers phones at a travel agency by day, but in her off time (and, increasingly, during work, too), she dreams of being a comic book artist. Her stories are beautifully drawn tales of pretty girls falling in love with handsome adventurers, a made-up life she fantasizes about for herself. When her made-up stories dominate conversations with her best friends, they decide she needs a real-life injection, so they schedule a trip to Singapore together, only Sophie’s friends never show up. Left to fend for herself, she stumbles into a crazy, ridiculous, completely boring story of an enormous diamond, wealthy criminals who want to blow up the world, a mysterious black widow whose three ex-husbands have met unfortunate ends, and an undercover cop (or spy; it’s never made clear but that doesn’t matter) named David.
Sophie’s cluelessness gets her inextricably involved in all this espionage and international crime; David is forced to team up with her; there’s an amusing training sequence where Sophie learns to fight. Chinese films tend to present poetic moments, but those moments are seldom lingered on, the way they are in Japanese films. There are a couple of moments in My Lucky Star, however, where completely out of nowhere, we get that lingering, as when David tells Sophie to observe the scenery around them. He sees exit routes and possible hidden weapons. Sophie, the artist-dreamer-storyteller, sees something completely different, and it is the film’s best scene, one of those moments you remember long after you’ve forgotten everything else about the movie, like that tell-me-why-you-love-wine scene in Sideways.
There are other, smaller intances like that, and they completely rescue the film from being merely a reason to spend time with one of the most beautiful actresses in the world in a wide variety of costumes. There’s a whimsy here that says the film-makers were having some creative fun, even while telling one of the most clichéd stories in filmdom. This is by no means a must-see film, but it made me feel pretty good, and that’s what a romantic comedy is supposed to do, no matter the sad, sorry state of your tortured romantic soul. Worth a look if you love romantic comedies and/or Zhang Ziyi.
Three-point Zhang Ziyi bump.
6/10 (IMDb rating)
62/100 (Criticker rating)
My Lucky Star (2013)
