Oh Lucy

Oh Lucy may well have set a record for the number of suicides in a romantic comedy.  Normally there would be…[sound of calculator] um, yes, approximately none. 

Here we start with a citizen’s suicide in the underground, another one reported soon after, then climactically two failed attempts. One is by the beautiful young niece, the other by the mousey middle-aged heroine. And the son of the man who saves her killed himself too. 

      Oy Lucy. Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn this ain’t. The suicides punctuate a panorama of lives lived and wasted in quiet desperation. 

The film’s title and trailer carried not an inkling of the darkness in this “love story.” A repressed Tokyo office worker discovers her wild side when she falls for her young American English teacher and follows him out to sunny California. From the moment she adopts her new American name of Lucy and dons the crazy Harpo blonde wig, love and hilarity ensue. Spoiler alert: Nope.

The clues come early. Our first view of “Lucy” is behind the white face-mask that connotes fear of infection, fear of contamination, fear of life.  She witnesses the first subway suicide and hears about the second. She’s uncomfortable and cramped in her office job, a room of exposed desks, where even her eventual humiliation plays out in public. 

Her stunted emotional life dates back to her first love, whom her sister stole and married. Lucy’s sex with Tom avenges that, though at her niece’s emotional expense as well as Lucy’s sister’s. 

It’s hard to sympathize with Lucy. She’s duped by her flighty niece into (over)paying for the English lessons. After tutor John departs, the dashed Lucy explodes at her colleague’s retirement party, brutally and pointlessly exposing the sham sentiments of the occasion. 

Our glimpses of Lucy’s apartment are of a chaotic mess of random and lurid junk, an emblem of her own doomed dream life perhaps. Liberated from Japanese restraints, in America her sexual predation deepens her indecorum and delusion.  

Indeed no-one here is wholly sympathetic. The dashing hugger John may come on as the fresh American spirit but he proves a jerk too. He abandoned his wife and daughter for the adventure in Japan, then abdicated his responsibilities to chase his latest fancy. If he indeed did quit a teaching job at Stanford, then he stands with Lucy, the niece, her mother, another example of people who make disastrous life choices.

A fringe character provides the only stability. English student “Tom” embraces John’s compulsion to embrace but proves able and committed to that emotional, human life. The goofy prosaic Japanese man proves the saviour Lucy craved to find in the dashing American. 
     After Tom saves Lucy the film closes on the note off their romantic promise. But it’s in the underground, where the suicides happen. And it took his son’s suicide to snap Tom into human intimacy. It may start with John’s shallow friendliness but in Tom it blossoms into a true connection.