Oh Lucy! is a deliciously funny black comedy that takes aim at the stereotypes of two different cultures and in which you simply cannot help fall more than a little in love with the seemingly sad sack of a protagonist.
Setsuko (Shinobu Terajima) is a middle-aged unmarried office worker in some anonymous Tokyo Office in which she is expected to pass the whole of her working life doing the same mundane monotonous tasks every single day. She lives in a tiny one-room apartment which is crammed packed with the remains of unfinished food and unopened mail.
Then one day out of the blue she gets a phone call from her twentysomething rather manic niece, Mika (Shioli Kutsuna) who asks for help. Desperately broke she wants Setsuko to take over a course of English Lessons which she signed up for but can no longer afford, and for which she cannot get her money back. As she is somewhat sweet on Mika, Setsuko agrees and goes off to the School for a trial lesson.
The ‘school’ is located in one of the city’s infamous Love Hotels, and once inside this most unlikely setting, she is greeted by John (Josh Hartnett) the teacher who insists on being very American and hugging her the moment she walks into the room. His unorthodox methods include the fact that all pupils must adopt American names …..she is ‘christened’ Lucy ….. and wear wigs to acclimatize themselves away from being their traditional reserved Japanese selves.
As horrified as ‘Lucy’ is by all of this, at the end of the lesson she finds she actually likes it, and in particular, John on whom she has quickly developed a crush.
She is therefore horrified when she returns for her second lesson to discover that John has left the school and that he has gone back home to the US. If that is not enough of a shock, she also finds that Mika has also gone with him thanks to the money that Setsuko had paid her to take over the lessons.
A couple of months later when Setsuko/Lucy receives a postcard from Mika that gives her a return address she decides to set off to the US herself, ostensibly to find her but it’s the whereabouts of John that she really is much more interested in. Her elder sister Ayako (Kaho Minami), who is also Mika’s mother, insists on tagging along although there is not much love lost between her and her daughter. There is also an undercurrent of bad feeling between the sisters too which dates back to when Ayako stole Setsuko’s only boyfriend and married him.
When they arrive at the seedy apartment where John has holed up alone and broke as Mika soon up and left, suddenly he looks far less attractive than he did as a sophisticated foreigner back in Tokyo. That doesn’t stop the sisters inveigling him into joining them chasing after Mika, and along the way, the rather desperate Lucy keeps making some bad errors of judgments as the comedy starts to get a tad darker.
Much of the humor had been initially directed at the sensibility of the reserved Japanese middle classes, now it takes aim at the recklessness of surfer types dudes and blue-collar Californians in this hilarious tale of culture clash.
The film was inspired by the writer/director Atsuko Hirayanagi’s own experiences when she first came to study in the US as a student, which certainly lent the whole piece such authenticity. Teraiima in her ridiculous blonde is a sheer delight as the reckless Japanese spinster who can lose all her inhibitions when her buttons are pressed. Her performance is pitch perfect and she is totally irresistible as the misfit who in the end will always refuse to conform.
This wacky and quite wonderful tale will definitely find an audience with people who feel their lives should be shaken up a bit: which frankly is most of us at one time or another.
