Sasie Sealy

(On Cable TV, September 2021) One of the best compliments I can make about a film is praising the way it immerses us in another way of living, rarely shown on screen — maybe a historical period, maybe another country, maybe a marginalized group. This praise is usually understood to be an accessory to a sustained narrative: that it complements the story. Lucky Grandma chooses to invert the proportions: It’s primarily a character study, and then only accessorily (and disappointingly) a story. Our protagonist is an unusual figure in American cinema: an elderly woman of Chinese ethnicity, living in New York City’s Chinatown. She speaks English but prefers Cantonese, lives by herself despite her progeny’s concerns, and gets her thrills by going on group outings to Atlantic City casinos. In keeping with writer-director Sasie Sealy’s desire to keep the camera on its protagonist (Tsai Chin, in a remarkable performance) as long as possible, the plot gets going fairly late, as she comes into possession of a duffel bag filled with mob money after an unsuccessful gambling run. She gets involved in a bit of a mob dispute and it ends more realistically than you’d expect. Still, the point here is an American film set in NYC and featuring a majority of Chinese dialogue, in which the English-speaking characters are usually portrayed as intrusions. It’s an unusual mixture — By most standards, it feels slack, slow, and not as much fun as expected. But Lucky Grandma wasn’t designed to be either fast, tight or fun. It does get the atmosphere right, though.