New Releases

OH LUCY!

Directed by Atsuko Hirayanagi

USA, 2018, 1h 35min, DCP

New Releases

There are no current or future screenings planned for this film.

“It’s a near-minor miracle that just about everything works in this emphatically modest comedy-drama… The writer-director Atsuko Hirayanagi isn’t selling a packaged idea about what it means to be human; she does something trickier and more honest here, merely by tracing the ordinary absurdities and agonies of one woman’s life.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“OH, LUCY! also points the way forward for how to tell compelling stories about women of a certain age, without dumbing down its core… Here, Hirayanagi gives her lead respect by framing her specific dilemma in a way that feels sincere.” – Andrew Lapin, NPR

Setsuko (Independent Spirit award nominee Shinobu Terajima), is a single, emotionally unfulfilled woman, seemingly stuck with a drab, meaningless life in Tokyo. At least until she’s convinced by her niece, Mika to enroll in an unorthodox English class that requires her to wear a blonde wig and take on an American alter ego named “Lucy.” This new identity awakens something dormant in Setsuko, and she quickly develops romantic feelings for her American instructor, John (Josh Hartnett).

When John suddenly disappears from class and Setsuko learns that he and her niece were secretly dating, Setsuko enlists the help of her sister, Ayako and the pair fly halfway across the world to the outskirts of Southern California in search of the runaway couple. In a brave new world of tattoo parlors and seedy motels, family ties and past lives are tested as Setsuko struggles to preserve the dream and promise of “Lucy.”

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