Fear and Trembling

Before I worked in a video store, I worked in a West Hollywood office for a post-production company. I edited subtitle tracks to go along with DVD's - normally, we'd get a timed subtitle file in from HBO, then I'd go along with a computer program and make sure the subtitles and the spoken language lined up properly, and then we'd send it along to different companies to actually author the finished DVD's.

I got along with almost everyone at the office, with the decided exception of one manager. Leslie. Well, she wasn't really a manager. She had been with the company forever, and had a higher-up position than me, but she wasn't really my personal supervisor or anything. Her work had nothing at all to do with mine.

But still, she had a real hard-on for me. She just didn't like me. I never knew why, but thinking back on it, I believe I can trace the whole ugliness back to a single day when I was still relatively new to the company. She had asked (in front of the entire office, mind you) whether or not I was willing to work a lot of overtime, if neccessary.

Thinking it an odd question, mainly because it was out of nowhere and totally hypothetical, I responded to it as a friendly, personal query, rather than a professional one. "I guess, Leslie, if you need me to," was something like what I said.

"How much overtime could you work, if we needed you to?," she responded.

"I don't know...4 hours a week?"

I now realize this was the wrong answer. I shouldn't have given her a specific amount of time at all. It wasn't the promise of specific overtime hours she wanted...she wanted allegiance. She wanted me to answer that I would work as long as she wanted me to, if I was needed. So, by making it a personal question, and answering the question truthfully like I did, I kind of ruined my professional relationship with this woman. She undermined me in the office from that day until the day I quit, 3 years later.



It's a similar predicament in some ways to the one Amelie faces in the delightful French-Japanese 2003 co-production Fear and Trembling. The title refers to how one should traditionally greet a Japanese Emperor - with fear and trembling. Amelie, a Belgian woman who spent the first five years of her life in Japan, has yearned ever since to return.

She does so, finding a job in Tokyo for a large catalogue company called Yakamoto Corporation. At first, she's hired as a translator, but over time she will serve as an office assistant, an accountant, a researcher and, eventually, a toilet scrubber.

Amelie's descent down the Japanese corporate ladder is clearly meant as an analogy for the cultural differences between East and West, how these two groups always meet up with confusion when interrelating because they make so little attempt to understand one another.

But it also works as simply a knowing, humorous movie about office life. The film is based on an autobiographical memoir by a real woman named Amelie who worked in Japan, and it's clearly the work of someone who has experienced the frustration and boredom of a corporate job first-hand.

Amelie's main problem is that she expects to be treated as a human being, as is the Western custom when working in an office, whereas the management tends to view her as a mindless drone. When she brings coffee in to an important meeting, she greets everyone in Japanese, showing off her abilities with the language. She is later reprimanded harshly by her sharp-tongued, overweight boss Mr. Omochi (Bison Katayama, in the film's funniest performance); now that the other company knows there is a foreigner who speaks Japanese at Yakamoto, they might be hesitant to do business with the company.

A large point is made about the lack of basic politeness in the Japanese work force. Amelie at first recoils at being screamed at by her superiors, and even gets emotional on occasion. But eventually, she comes to value the system. Fear of reprisal motivates her to work harder, and at least in the Japanese system, you know where you stand at all times. In America, bosses are equally as likely to get upset with employees who mess up...but, like my old boss Leslie, often they will keep these feelings under the surface, and subtly work against employees without ever actually saying anything to them.

I think this, more than anything else, gets at the heart of Fear and Trembling's observations. It's not so much about how different Japan's offices are from Europe's or America's - it's more about how everywhere people are the same, but they choose to express themselves differently. If you don't take the time to learn how people in a certain part of the world express themselves, you will enter more and more uncomfortable and awkward situations.

At one point, Amelie's hateful, backstabbing co-worker Fubuki (Kaori Tsuji) runs out of the office, visibly upset after a particularly harsh verbal lashing from Omochi. Amelie, who sees herself as essentially a kind, decent person, runs after her into the ladies' room. Like any other friendly, outgoing Westerner, Amelie thinks Fubuki might want a comforting shoulder to cry on.

But Amelie doesn't realize Fubuki has run out of the room specifically to be alone, that the greatest humiliation for a Japanese professional is to have someone see them cry. So Amelie's unwanted intrusion, though well-intentioned, only makes matters worse.

Eventually, she discovers that she may not want to work in a Japanese corporation after all, but that it is possible for her to learn a proper way to interact. It's a subtle change, and Fear and Trembling is a subtle movie. It takes place almost entirely within a single office, with a small cast of characters. Its substance is the mundane everyday life of an office professional - meetings, coffee breaks, spats with co-workers, arbitrary busy work.

Sylvie Testud is a wonder as Amelie, at once jaded and naive, ambitious and world-weary. During a sequence in which Amelie spends 3 long nights in the office, forced to complete an arduous, difficult accounting task, Testud is called upon to essentially lose her mind on-screen. She strips down naked, tosses garbage on to herself, and hugs her co-workers computer. Silly though the sequence is, we never for once doubt the veracity of the situation - if the real Amelie is anything like Testud's interpretation, I fully believe, late one night, she rubbed her nude body over her colleagues personal computers out of panic, glee and frustration.