Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Review: In ‘Good Luck,’ Miners in Serbia and Suriname Share a Cinematic Link

A scene from “Good Luck,” directed by Ben Russell.Credit...Ben Russell/KinoElektron
Good Luck
NYT Critic’s Pick
Directed by Ben Russell
Documentary
2h 23m

Ben Russell’s experimental documentary “Good Luck” puts two groups of people who will never meet in spiritual conversation. The first half documents work in a Serbian copper mine whose employees toil daily, sometimes for years, in an environment where “it is always night,” as one says. The second half takes place in the Surinamese jungle, where miners of a different sort dig and pan for gold.

The settings and the workers are, in a sense, opposites. The Serbian mine is terrifyingly claustrophobic; the muddy shores in Suriname couldn’t be more open-air. The Serbians are white, the Surinamese black. The first group works in a state-owned mine, the second without obvious oversight.

Video
Video player loading
A preview of the film.

The phrase “good luck” is uttered in both contexts, with different connotations, but the subjects’ desperation, dreams and camaraderie become unifying threads. In both parts, Mr. Russell periodically cuts to black-and-white shots of individual workers looking at the camera, portrait-style. Elsewhere, he tends to emphasize their collective activity.

Both halves feature breathtaking camera work. Early in the Serbian segment, workers crammed into an elevator descend into the depths of the mine; the shot mirrors a famous sequence in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” There’s so little light that what’s visible sometimes appears in a porthole-like dot onscreen.

In Suriname, Mr. Russell films the morning mist with a Monet-like abstraction and executes remarkable Steadicam shots through the mud. He might be accused of making poverty poetry — except that both sites’ unlikely beauty, too, may be a connecting thread.

Not rated. In Serbian and Saramaccan with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 23 minutes.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Good Luck. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT