Existentialist employment, salaryman-style.
Remember the '90s phenomenon of Japanese salarymen dropping dead at their desks? There was even a name for it-
karoshi
, literally "death by overwork." Belated in Santa Fe, 2003's
Fear and Trembling
depicts just such homicidal loyalty to a Japanese
corporation.
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Belgian Amélie (Sylvie Testud) was born in Japan and spent her first five years there, imprinting on its cultural aesthetic. So when she finally lands a job as a translator for import-export firm Yamimoto, she's overjoyed-now she'll have a chance to become, as she says rapturously,
un vrai japonais
. But first she must jump through a complicated series of uniquely Japanese hoops to prove her worth to the company, and Amélie's European-educated mind doesn't easily comply. Given tasks she perceives as demeaning, she stubbornly balks and is given in turn even more degrading jobs by her frustrated Japanese employers, including photocopying a thousand-page document without using the automatic feed, carefully and wearily aligning each original on the glass plate.
Fear and Trembling
would be nothing more than an exhausting-to-watch simulacrum of mindless work if it weren't for the twisted relationship between Amélie and her immediate superior Fubuki Mori (Kaori Tsuji). Of Miss Mori's staggering beauty, Amélie says, "It was destined to rule the world," and accordingly spends a lot of time at her desk gazing dreamily at her supervisor. But as Amélie continues to fight the system, overstepping boundaries to write a successful presentation, her fledgling friend Fubuki-san becomes incensed, publicly upbraiding Amélie and demoting her to the ultimate entry-level job. "There is always a way to obey," Fubuki-san instructs Amélie, as her dazed employee approaches the possibility of serious
karoshi
.
Sylvie Testud is a genuine revelation; her Japanese is uncanny and she has astounding range, over the course of the film becoming all sunken eyes and tangled hair. She and
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Kaori Tsuji, who plays Fubuki with relish and nerve, are fabulous antagonists, with Testud's wizened, lascivious little face pitted against Tsuji's ironic "inscrutable Asiatic beauty" in scene after scene of formal but scathing business dialogue.
One could make the argument that
Fear and Trembling
fails to give a comprehensive vision of Japanese life; not a single scene takes place outside the 44th-floor office setting, and you never see Amélie or any other character at home or out with friends. But that's just the real-time quality the film wants to put across: that all-consuming feeling only a job from hell has, when you work late nights and early mornings and eventually start to believe that nothing exists but your desk and the papers covering it. Similarly, the film's score, consisting entirely of a harpsichord recording of the
Goldberg Variations
, thickens every scene and adds just the right repetitive thematic quality, insular and complex and not a little schizoid.
Fear and Trembling
has been usefully compared to both
Office Space
and
Secretary
but perhaps it's really more like
Groundhog Day
, as each day repeats itself with some increasingly nightmarish variation and Amélie's exhaustion takes on a shimmering existential quality-the cultural translation, perhaps, of human submission to time and fate.
