Alain Corneau's 2003 Movie "Fear and Trembling" with Sylvie Testud Trying to Survive in a Tokyo Company

The daughter of a Belgian diplomat, Amélie Nothomb was born (in 1967) in Japan and spent her first five years there. Having maintained her ability to speak Japanese and longing for her childhood paradise, she took a job at a large corporation in Tokyo in 1990. To make a long story short, it was not childhood paradise regained.

As recalled in her 1998 novel Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and Trembling-the attitude one should have in approaching the Japanese emperor, not Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling) and the 2003 screen adaptation of it by Alain Corneau (who died I August, his best known film was "Tous les matins du monde" (1991), but he mostly made neo-noirs), hardly anyone in the company knew. how to use her talents. Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) had a very hard time doing anything her boss Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) found acceptable in "The Devil Wears Prada," but Amélie had not only an immediate superior who did not want her to succeed, but two layers above her boss who seemed to want to break her spirit rather than use her knowledge about Europe and mother-tongue French.

Initially, Amélie (Sylvie Testud) thinks that her boss, the astonishingly tall and composed Fubuki (Tsuji Kaori) is her friend, comforting her from humiliations inflicted by Fubuki's boss on Amélie, but her Miranda Priestly side is just better masked. I will leave the series of humiliating failures unspecified, but there is only one person in the company who wants to use Amélie rather than force her into the Yumimoto corporate mold, Tenshi-san (Kondo Yasunari) and he gets in trouble for taking initiative, useful as it would be for the company's profitability Everyone else, and especially Fubuki, who had to slave for seven years before being promoted, are far more committed to hierarchy (submission) than to anything out.

Amélie seems pretty American in her inability to understand that hierarchy trumps even profitability and that her go-get-it approach is profoundly unsettling and disruptive to the organization. The black comedy of corporate culture coming down on something of a free spirit is made with great skill and confirms my worst fears of what it would be like to be in such an organization. Still, I have to wonder how anyone fluent in Japanese (able to use the honorifics correctly, for instance) and familiar with Japanese literature can be quite so clueless (and totally unable to use jujitsu of everyday life on her superordinates).

The Japanese word oujou, commonly translated as submission, also means dying a happy death as well as giving up struggling, and feeling flummoxed.* Amélie is definitely flummoxed, and teetering on the edge of despair. She is willing to denigrate herself to Fubuki et al., but never despairs. Partly, she avoids suicide or resigning by imagining herself flying over Tokyo. She is more able to bear insults than most westerners would be, but not to die a happy death.

Her self-abasing conferences with each level of superordinate announcing she will not be renewing her employment contract are hilarious. Three of the four surprise her...

Watching the cross-cultural misunderstandings, Oshima's film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" came to mind. Lo and behold, Amélie brought it up (with a clip) to Fubuku. Fubuku liked Sakamoto's music, but not the story, and failed to see any relevance of the conflicts between David Bowie's POW Lawrence and Ryûich Sakamoto's camp commander Yonoi in their own conflicts. (For one thing, Amélie could quit and leave. For another, the less eroticized fascination is more European for Japanese here than Yonoi's for Lawrence. But!)

The horrors of 1990 paid off with a book that was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française and turned into this very entertaining (though scary) movie. Though no doubt exaggerated, satire only works if something genuine is being exaggerated, and I have no doubt that the fictional Yumimoto Corporation has a firm basis in the reality of Japanese corporations, especially circa 1990. And the psychodynamics of Fubuki being aroused by Amélie's playing (Dilbert-like) at submission also seems to me to provide genuine insight that may be culturally more important but is not culture-specific (see "Secretary").

(In the movie, Amélie has no existence outside the office. The viewer has no idea where or how she lives in Tokyo or if she has any friends of any nationality there. Work takes up most of the working hours of Japanese office workers, and she works even longer ones.)

I am disappointed that the "making of" bonus feature on the DVD is entirely records of shooting scenes without any interviews of anyone (I was hoping for Nothomb, but would have settled for Testud or Tsuji, the latter was directed in English I noticed). It made clear that the crew was all European, though the movie is almost all in Japanese (Testud learned her lines phonetically; the absence of tone in Japanese makes this feasible, unlike for Sino-Tibetan languages.)

I think F&T is far superior to "Lost in Translation" and is better even than "Enlightenment Guaranteed." A viewer of F&T at least can see that the Japanese are flummoxed by Amélie as well as flummoxing her. That she understands the language so well is actually a problem, since foreigners are supposed to remain alien.
Testud won a César as best actress for her performance. She is in every scene except a few brief shots of males getting into or out the elevator (for reasons I won't reveal), and has a lot of voiceover commentary on her plight, as well as her extensive Japanese dialogue.

*www.japanese-symbols.org/japanese-symbol-for-submission