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Children of Invention
First-time writer-director Chun’s own childhood experiences provide the lived-in textures of this heartrending, bleakly humorous and beautifully observed indie drama about a broken family desperately striving for a middle-class foothold in 21st-century America.
Financially abandoned by her husband, Hong Kong immigrant Elaine Cheng (Cheung) tries to provide for her two American-born kids, but her commission-only job in Boston real-estate sales proves a dead end, leaving her vulnerable to the false promises of a pyramid scheme selling overhyped personal-care products. Her leveraged investment of $2,500 to join the scam leads to the family’s eviction, but one of Elaine’s real-estate connections finds them a temporary and illegal squat in a condo show home.
Her children, ten-year-old Raymond (Chen) and eight-year-old Tina (Chiu), are forced by circumstances to learn premature self-reliance, and when Elaine fails to come home from one of her countless and fruitless sales meetings, they stoically undertake to shift for themselves.
Chun leans unnecessarily on the chiming indie-rock guitars of T. Griffin’s score for poignancy, but otherwise rarely puts a foot wrong. The main strengths of his film are the wonderfully unaffected performances he extracts from his juvenile leads and his dry-eyed refusal to sentimentalize their plight or poverty in general. It’s a film well worth seeing from a young filmmaker to be watched.
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