On the basis of his heartrending Lucky, I must account Avie Luthra one of the most soulful and sensitive Indian filmmakers now working. (He is currently based in the U.K.) His gem of a film, in Zulu, Tamil and English, revolves around a little Zulu boy, perhaps six or seven years old, whose father is out of the picture, perhaps dead, and whose mother has just died of AIDS. Lucky is therefore transplanted from his rural village to Durban, which is sometimes described as the “South African Mumbai,” to live with an uncle who will not yield an inch of his self-satisfied lifestyle to accommodate his nephew or the boy’s tender years and predicament. An older woman from India is a neighbor at the complex where Lucky’s uncle lives. Lucky tries befriending her, to use her machine to play a tape he has of his mother’s last words to him, but this neighbor is suspicious, unfriendly, racist. However, she relents once she sees how coldly and with what little interest her neighbor treats Lucky.
After he has heard the tape of his mother, in a different setting where he is all alone, he recalls his mother’s voice in song; when Luthra adds to this an insert of Lucky’s recollected image of her, with her singing bridging the shift from the aural recollection to the aural/visual recollection of the lost mother, the writer-director achieves the film’s most eloquent, most moving moment.
But perhaps the film’s most brilliant aspect, reflected in the neighbor’s shift in attitude toward Lucky, is the suggestion that racial hostility is sometimes a well-practiced mask of superficial rather than bone-deep behavior, worn mostly as self-protection.
In addition to being a filmmaker who has won an astonishing fifty festival prizes, Luthra is a practicing psychiatrist.
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Dennis Grunes 