KFL Hard to believe that this is taken seriously by anyone who knows anything about Japanese corporate culture.Yes, talented women are frequently relegated to serving tea. Otherwise there's not much else to take away from this absurdly distorted view of a Japanese company, the "Yumimoto Corporation" (even the company name does not wash as a Japanese proper noun).I am an American fluent in Japanese, and have worked in a half dozen different Japanese firms. None of them bear the slightest resemblance to this place, which struck me as a Japanified Dilbert strip, minus the humor.And anyone "impressed with" Testud's parroted Japanese has scant familiarity with the language. Tom Conti did a much better job in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a short clip of which appears herein.An idiotic, absurd hit job, the poorly planned and poorly executed consequence of taking seriously one woman's revenge fantasy. Avoid.

Roger Burke Films about working in the office – any office – have been done before: Nine to Five (1980) comes to mind readily and there are many others too numerous to mention.But, whereas this film has its comedic moments, it's not the same kind of comedy as the above, and not just because it was made in Japan, although that helped.This really is a story about the difficulties in communication and understanding that exist between cultures and, arguably, those differences between Japanese culture and Western are, or can be, daunting.Happily, the director presents the narrative from the Amelie's (Sylvie Testud) point of view almost exclusively. In doing so, he exposes and satirizes some of the ridiculous situations that do exist in the Japanese workplace, which, in another culture, would also be equally stupid, if not criminal.Everybody's come up against tunnel vision in a supervisor. And the same goes for professional jealousy between co-workers. The difference with this film is, of course, the fact that Japanese modes of interaction, manager-worker relationships and, most importantly, individual initiative are regarded very differently when compared to similar conditions in an office in New York, London, Sydney or any other major Western city. To take just one example, a Western vice-president these days would be charged with assault if he'd acted in the same way as Omochi (Bison Katayama) did towards Amelie when the toilet paper tray in the men's toilet was empty. The fact that I could still laugh at that scene testifies to the ability of the director to highlight the absurdity of it all.As you might expect, there's a lot of dialog, almost as much voice-over by Amelie as she thinks and fantasizes and very little in the way of action – well, action-fan type action, know what I mean? So, this movie will not appeal to everybody. I really liked it though as I have a soft spot for Japanese culture anyway, having been steeped in martial arts for nearly thirty years.For me, this was a subtly satisfying slice of life of a Westerner – and female to boot -- in Japan. And quite hilarious at times.

frankgaipa "I had, outside the company, an existence far from empty or insignificant. I decided not to speak of it here…eleven metro stations from there, was a place where (Japanese) liked me, respected me, and saw no rapport at all between a toilet brush and me" (my awkward translation from p. 159-160, Stupeur et tremblements, Editions Albin Michel S.A., 1999). The novel's barely 200 pages of largish print. Nearly all of the movie's events have already gone down by the time Nothomb pauses to excuse the world outside la compagnie Yumimoto. Two years have passed since I saw the film, and two weeks since I read the novel. I can't recall whether the admission made it into the film. If so, it may been too easy to miss in the general downward rush.My overwhelming reaction to the film, and somewhat less so to the novel, was a confusion of annoyance with and embarrassment for Amélie. Again and again, not so unlike a horror movie heroine stupidly wandering into dark places alone, she does what even we totally out of it in the audience can see is going to be the wrong thing. Again and again, I asked myself: Why can't she bide her time awhile, watch and learn? Of course she couldn't. They wouldn't let her. But still, as least as Sylvie Testud plays her, she might have gotten on even Westerners' nerves. I can imagine working with or around her in such an office, but might not always like it. Yet add a life outside as indicated that quote with which I began, and it's possible to see not just a saner host society but a saner Amélie/Nothomb as well. Fubuki too, comes across a bit more complexly in the novel where she's a genuinely tragic figure, too old (at an insanely young age) to marry wisely, but this is at the expense of pages of exposition that would have stopped the film cold. When the vice-president has a screaming fit at Fubuki, Amélie sees unconscious sexual tension, an excuse for the fat man to get close to the imposing beauty. An unlikely but apt touch point film might be Neil Labute's 1997 In the Company of Men.An American-born but much older coworker of mine used to tweak us by saying about Japanese visiting the Bay Area, "Hey, they reeeally impress me. They're so regimented! I wish I could be like that!" I don't think he meant it. More likely he was reminding us that those otherworldly visitors were not him. Stupeur et tremblements has the form of a horror flick, or even of Larry David-style embarrassment comedy. To get more out of it, try to imagine for each character, even the obese vice-president, a 24-hour day.

thither Being a dumb yank, I'd never even heard of the book this movie was based on, so I saw it based on a blurb describing it as similar to Office Space and Lost in Translation. With that in mind, I was somewhat disappointed by Fear and Trembling (no relationship to the Kierkegaard book of the same name).I think my main problem was that the protagonist seemed like a blank slate, just as inscrutable in her own way as the Western stereotype of Japanese and other Asian people. She endures a variety of awful humiliations, but we get barely any insight at all into why she does so, apart from a vague longing to be Japanese. There is a little bit of flowery language about the city of Nara at the beginning, and we learn that she lived there as a child, but there is very little indication of what is driving her, in the present day, to integrate herself into a business culture which she obviously finds deeply unpleasant.Compounding this is that the protagonist is never seen outside of the environment of the office. It's fine to keep the focus there, but a little indication with how she interacts with the part of Japan that is outside the office building could have greatly increased our understanding of the character.At its worst, Fear and Trembling is a dour indictment of petty office politics which can doubtless be found in any large corporate headquarters. Things like backstabbing colleagues, autocratic and incompetent bosses, and spiteful busywork being assigned to hapless underlings are certainly not things that are unique to Japanese culture. While some episodes do cast a little illumination on (the writer's take on) that culture, for the most part they could take place anywhere. This fact makes the protagonist's persistence seem all the more puzzling.The movie does have its moments, though. When it lets its hair down a little bit (as in an early scene involving calendars, or in a repeated one featuring the protagonist flying above the city) there is a good amount of humor and levity to be found, and the performances are all fairly good. Overall it's a worthy, but flawed, effort.