Review by Cameron Maitland

When a director takes on the task of orchestrating and achieving a smooth anthology film, they tend to be setting themselves up for failure with a final product too disparate and chunky to enjoy. With her collaboration Lucky 7, Singaporean filmmaker Sun Koh hopes that the surrealist concept of the exquisite corpse can change negative perceptions of the anthology film.

Invented by the surrealists, the exquisite corpse is a collaborative piece rotated amongst creators wherein the next creator can only see the very end of the piece made before them. In this case Koh allowed each director to only see the last minute of the 10-12 minute segment produced before them but made the demand that the same actor, the undeniably flexible and talented Sunny Pang, appear in each segment.

In the end we get a film that has seven segments ranging from intimate dramatic pieces about love and dying to bombastic animations about pedophilia. Each director brings their own take and style and no two sections are too similar, which definitely makes the entire experience fast-paced.

Unfortunately, too many of the pieces are weak and the whole collapses under the stress. More than half juvenilely fumble with overly provocative portrayals of sex, sadomasochism, violence and gender issues. While it’s laudable to bring up such issues in a society like Singapore, the execution leaves much to be desired. The few pieces that do work are overwhelmed or mocked by the failures of the segments around them and their clear lack of bother to create any links or cohesion between segments. Worse yet, the filmmakers who try to play homage to surrealist film create bigger trainwrecks that would seem more at home in a first year film class than alongside great short pieces.

In the grand scheme of anthologies, Lucky 7 falls prey to the same problems as many of its anthology predecessors. Though there are glimmers of hope in some of the segments, but in the end you wish they’d just have existed as a series of shorts rather than a collected whole.

Lucky 7
Sun Koh et al | Singapore | 2008 | 82min

Sun. Sept. 28 | 7:15pm | Vancity Theatre
Mon. Sept. 29 | 3:45pm | Vancity Theatre