• Oh Lucy!

11/19/18 (Mon), Tokyo

An oddball Japanese film about a lonely Japanese office worker named Setsuko (the ever-reliable Terashima Shinobu) with a knack for ruining lives. Convinced by her niece Mika into paying through the nose for English lessons, she proceeds to fall in love with the handsome teacher John (Josh Harmon), who gives her a blonde wig, the moniker Lucy, a new and brighter personality, and the sense that she’s accepted. Unfortunately she realizes she’s been scammed when the teacher suddenly runs away to California with the niece and, in a sense, “Lucy”. Determined to get to the bottom of this, she joins hands with her bitter older sister (Minami Kaho), i.e., Mika’s mom, and plots to track them down. Then the fun begins.

The movie does not settle for easy characters. Mika is likeably adventurous but deceitful and manipulative, her mother is cynical and perpetually bad-tempered, the English teacher is attractive but tells damaging lies. Setsuko, so appealing in her Lucy guise, can be sour and downright cruel in her normal life, as in her drunken interaction with a fellow office worker and a spiteful act that prompts Mika to attempt suicide. She is deceived by her niece, despised by her sister, ignored by her coworkers, led astray by her teacher – and yet at least some of this may be the result of her own actions. It is hard to know who to like here, and no one comes out smelling like roses. But all are believable in the course of the story. Screwball touches like the English lesson (“Hi, I’m Rue-shee! What’s up?”), which could be grating, prove unexpectedly engaging as presented here. The film can also be moving, as when Setsuko’s fellow student, played with appealing eccentricity by Yakusho Koji, confesses his guilt as an overly strict father.

Writer/director Hirayanagi Atsuko, making her feature-length debut, has created a road movie that goes in unpredictable directions where the lead starts nowhere and ends there, searching for herself in all the wrong places. A quirky and interesting comedy.