Director Mina Shum (Double Happiness) originally conceived the sticky magical-realist fable Long Life, Happiness, And Prosperity as three short films, until she realized they were all interconnected. This was a dangerous realization—not just because three maudlin hunks of whimsy are more than one, but also because she had to dream up increasingly contrived ways to tidy things up. Designed as a love letter to the Chinese-Canadian community in Shum's native Vancouver, the film gets wrapped up in the cheesy exoticism of charms, potions, and fortune-tellers, but beneath it all lies a pedestrian slice of life, cursed by sitcom zingers and a weakness for confectionery sugar.
A squeaky-voiced imp from central casting, 12-year-old Valerie Tian walks around Chinatown in a get-up that trumpets her precociousness: a winter hat with strings around her chin, and a pair of oversized glasses that smother her face. Looking to lift the spirits of her mother Sandra Oh, Tian tries to use Taoist magic to bring love and financial stability, but her spells backfire comically or tragically on every occasion. Her meddling drastically alters the lives of her neighbors, including an elderly security guard (Chang Tseng) who loses his job, and a middle-aged butcher (Donald Fong) who wins the lottery. Tian also works on playing matchmaker for her lonely mother, but a love potion leaves Oh's prospective partner (Russell Yuen) infatuated with an older man.
Things get worse before they get better: The security guard, still proudly dressing for work every day, considers suicide; the butcher is becoming his estranged father; and a lightning storm puts Tian's life in jeopardy. As if there were any doubt, Shum straightens things out exactly as expected, content in her role as the benevolent hand of God. There's little excitement in a movie that has its i's and t's pre-dotted and crossed, because everything has been worked out so neatly beforehand that there's no possibility of spontaneity or surprise. Somehow, Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Decalogue) made stories of cosmic coincidence seem genuinely wondrous, where other similar tales seem like shameless button-pushers. Then again, none of Kieslowski's characters ever found the meaning of life by rescuing a lost turtle.