The Lucky Land Review: Dust, Tears, and an Accidental Goat

If you have got seventy minutes and a tolerance for heavy screen grain, The Lucky Land is a neat little find.

But look, if you absolutely hate silent films where people stare intensely at letters for three minutes, you should probably skip this. 🎥

It is a rare early Chinese drama that feels incredibly dusty but surprisingly alive.

The story is basically about people trying to find a better life, but everything goes wrong almost immediately.

I watched this late last night on a blurry stream.

Honestly, the best part is just watching Yumei Chen's face when she realizes her family is completely doomed.

She has this way of looking just slightly to the left of the camera lens.

It makes you feel like she is looking at a ghost, or maybe just a very tired director. 👻

The print I saw had this giant scratch right down the middle of the screen for ten minutes.

At first I thought it was a lightning bolt in the sky, but no, just eighty years of dust on the film strip.

The pacing is kind of all over the place.

Sometimes it moves like a bullet, and then we get five minutes of a guy just farming the dirt.

There is a scene where Tian Fang is digging with a shovel.

He looks so incredibly tired, and not just "acting" tired, but actual I-want-to-go-home tired.

It reminded me a bit of the desperate energy in Jewish Luck, though that movie has way more humor.

Here, the humor is mostly accidental, like when a random goat wanders into a very sad conversation.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of The Lucky Land (1933) through its definitive frames.

Nobody reacts to the goat at all.

They just keep crying while this goat nibbles on a wooden fence behind them. 🐐

I love small details like that.

It shows they probably could not afford to do another take just because an animal ruined the background.

The writing by Dingxun Yu is pretty standard melodrama stuff.

Lots of "Oh, the land is cruel!" type of vibes.

But the actors really try their absolute best.

Zhenduo Zhang has these incredibly thick eyebrows that do most of the acting for him.

When his character gets angry, his eyebrows basically touch his nose.

It is fantastic to watch.

If you enjoyed something like The Hidden Pearls for its old-school melodrama, you will probably dig this too.

Just do not expect a masterpiece.

It is more like a nice, warm time machine.

Sometimes a time machine has some bumps, and that is totally fine.

The music on the track I heard was just some repetitive piano loops.

I ended up muting it and playing some lo-fi beats, which actually matched the sad farming scenes perfectly. 🎧

Give it a go if you want to see something most people have completely forgotten about.