Lauded Japanese-American female filmmaker Atsuko Hirayanagi’s feature debut, OH LUCY!, derived from her own eponymous short, is a USA-Japan coproduction starring Shinobu Terajima as Setsuko, a Tokyo-dwelling, 40-something unwed, childless office lady (a kindred spirit of Kumiko in David Zellner’s KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER, 2014), whose benumbed workaday existence is shunted into a new lane when she enrolls in an English class for beginners, welcomed by the open-handed warmth generated from the American teacher John (Hartnett, still handsome enough to conquer lonely-hearts), and christened with a new English name Lucy and sporting a blond wig, Setsuko instantly cottons to John, soon, jolted by the latter’s unheralded departure with her niece Mika Ogawa (Kutsuna), she sets out a journey to the southern California to seek him out, on the pretense of the familial ties, and accompanied by her sister, Mika’s mother Ayako (Minami).
Setsuko/Lucy’s plight denotes the honest-to-good cliché of spinsterhood’s stigma which is so entrenched in our society’s mindset. Disparaged both in working places and within her own family, Setsuko is a hardened victim out of such chronic, collective mental abuse. She is bluff enough to debunk the hypocrisy to a retired colleague in her farewell party, despite that she is unable to dodge the grim fate of superseding the latter as the new anathema in the office, the canker never stops spewing its invisible virulence.
Plus, the drawn-out grudge between her and Ayako goes a long way back to the fact that Ayako has stolen the man she loves and started a family with him, which makes the relationship between Setsuko and Mika an increasingly complicated one, and Hirayanagi deftly channels out the toxicity with an unexpected turn of event in this otherwise light-hearted indie charmer coruscated with dry humor and straight-faced confrontations, often borne out of the milieu’s yawning cultural disparity (cutesy maid cafe versus nameless motel, suppressed subsistence versus laidback shiftlessness), though nothing particularly novel and we all know the drill by now (the sight of a deer materializing apropos of nothing is simply too blasé to elicit any other deeper feelings).
Having no qualms about neither shucking off the last fig leaf of the mythologized allure of an occidental foreigner, nor delving into the rock bottom of a self-seeking woman’s despair, eventually OH LUCY! lends on its feet with a positive vibe in that “I’m not the only one” revelation, imparted by Kôji Yakusho’s unpretentious mannerism, to offer a scintilla of optimism in Setsuko/Lucy’s never-ending jeremiad, superbly reified by Terajima’s leading performance which mingles utterly unfeigned spontaneity, perpetually miffed bemusement with ineffably understated sorrow that gives this pleasurable gem a winning if slight edge over the umpteen similar offerings infesting the niche art-film market.
referential entry: David Zellner’s KUMIKO, THE TREASURE HUNTER (2014, 6.8/10).
