TENSE IN TOKYO

REVIEWED - FEAR AND TREMBLING (STUPEUR ET TREMBLEMENTS): An unusual combination of The Office and Lost in Translation (with occasional flavours of Secretary), Alain Corneau's French drama focuses acutely on the subject of personal politics in the Japanese workplace, writes Donald Clarke.

We never see the film's characters at home or on the street. The city outside is only glimpsed in bland second unit shots. Fear and Trembling is thus a constrained, slightly claustrophobic piece of work, but also frequently gripping and of great anthropological interest.

Sylvie Testud, whose Japanese sounds pretty impressive, plays a young Belgian woman employed as a translator for a powerful Tokyo company. The strict hierarchies of the office are explained in the first few minutes: Testud reports to an apparently kindly woman, who in turn reports to a sat-upon middle-manager who reports to a fat, noisy bully, and so on.

When the unfortunate Westerner makes a few minor mistakes and is busted down to photocopying duties, she assumes that it is the men who are undermining her position. But, it transpires, she has not understood the jealousies that drive the woman she thought to be her friend.

Things deteriorate further and Testud eventually finds herself changing loo rolls and doing other odd-jobs in the bathroom. Her determination not to quit is matched by the stubbornness of her superiors who, as I understand it, would regard a sacking as evidence of failure on their part as well as hers.

Based on an autobiographical novel by Amélie Nothomb, The movie trundles along without ever quite getting into top gear. The relationship between Testud and her glamorous immediate superior (whose beauty the narrator constantly remarks upon) slowly develops a subtle sexual undertone, but, in keeping with a story set in such a stoic environment, strong emotions are not much in evidence elsewhere. As a result, Fear and Trembling ends up being a little too cool for comfort.