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Film

Indie flicks: A witty workplace

By STEVE PERSALL
Published May 5, 2005

Fear and Trembling (NR, probably PG-13) (102 min.) - Alain Corneau's droll comedy combines elements of Lost in Translation, Secretary and the funniest show on television these days, The Office. Sylvie Testud plays Amelie, born in Japan to Belgian parents, who returns to Tokyo for a job as translator with a multinational corporation. She's a go-getter whose eagerness to please - and still have fun in uptight work conditions - conflicts with her employers' cultural and corporate sensibilities.

Despite being fluent in Japanese (Testud learned her lines phonetically), Amelie often says the wrong things for the right reasons. That's a problem when her supervisor, Fubuki (Kaori Tsuji), an exquisitely tall woman on whom Amelie has a mild crush, gets chewed out by her boss. Amelie offers sympathy, which Fubuki declines, since that might suggest weakness. Amelie is demoted to cleaning toilets and copying paperwork, and her willingness to do anything for acceptance creeps into a kind of masochism.

Based on Amelie Nothomb's autobiographical novel, Fear and Trembling is constantly amusing, as petty office politics and fragile egos are revealed. Testud's performance won a best actress Cesar - the French equivalent of the Oscar - for impressively handling the technical difficulty of a new language while maintaining a sunny disposition during adversity in the best tradition of comical underdogs.

Corneau's screenplay wittily captures the cover-your-tail mood of a company so successful that the thought of failure can cause the fear and trembling of the title. Then, like cornered animals, they strike at the weakest target, which happens to be Amelie. Viewers may cringe with recognition of their job situations, but they'll usually be smiling. In French and Japanese, with subtitles. Grade: B-plus.

[Last modified May 3, 2005, 14:10:06]