Oh, Lucy!: A Japanese-American Comedy-Drama about Suicide, Idealised Love and Exploring New Cultures
Oh, Lucy! is a film about a middle-aged Japanese woman who, after falling for her English language tutor, travels to LA to find him, beginning a delusional and absurd journey of romance, heartache and self-hate. It began as a short film thesis by director Atsuko Hirayanagi before she realised the story was too big and required a feature length duration. Although there are some superbly funny moments where Japanese and American culture and characters clash and struggle to talk to each other, ultimately and unexpectedly, the film addresses suicide, finding hope in difficult situations and dealing with loss and a new culture from an unlikably chaotic but relatable character.
During a Q&A with Japanese-Australian actress Shiori Kutsuna (Deadpool 2, The Outsider) after the film, someone asked her what the movie tells us of current Japan. As a Japanese-Australian actress who lived in Australia till she was 14 years old to pursue a career in acting, Kutsuna argued that it told her that you don’t have to be traditionally Japanese to live in Japan. Setsuko’s status as a single and childless middle-aged woman experiencing an identity crisis is a powerful reminder that not everyone in Japan appeals to the workaholic or good wife, good mother myth. Not everyone is willing to put their company first before their own needs, wants and emotions. Not everyone knows what they want and how to get it.
Yet, to me, as someone who isn’t Japanese and wasn’t influenced by their own experience with the culture, it pictured the terrifyingly normalised attitude towards suicide in the country. Suicide, particularly the sudden act of walking into an incoming train, is a powerful narrative tool that binds the film. It begins with Setsuko, as she’s waiting for her train commute to work, witnessing a stranger commit suicide before cutting to her colleague admitting to her she wants to witness one for herself, and ends with the aftermath of her own suicide attempt. Similarly, frustrated with the news that her Auntie Setsuko has slept with the man she fell in love with and moved overseas for, Mika’s only solution to her problems is to escape the world she knows, jumping off the nearby cliff she would often visit for its breathtaking vista. Mika can’t handle the idea that her family member has slept with her former beloved and instead of confronting it, decides to escape from the situation indefinitely. Her mother, who joins Setsuko to find her daughter on the run, is tormented by the idea of her daughter committing suicide, suspecting that she is partly to blame. Mika ends up surviving but Setsuko is pushed away and no longer treated as family. On their walk home from class, Setsuko and her classmate Tom/Komori overhear a train conductor announcing indefinite delays on a line. After saving Setsuko from her own suicide attempt, Komori admits he blames himself for his son’s suicide many years ago.
In this way, the theme of suicide serves as a bookmark for the film’s crucial moments and characters, just as Setsuko’s aspired relationship with her teacher, John, drives the film. As such, even without the caricature of Japanese and American culture and language barriers, Hirayanagi hauntingly reminds us of how incredibly normal and expected suicide is in Japanese society. How easily it is to decide to do it. How there is little government and corporate agencies advocating against it in suicide. And, how it completely shatters families and the Japanese myth.
