Synopsis
Fear and Trembling (Stupeur et tremblements, 2003) is a French-Japanese tragicomedy from Alain Corneau you can watch online on iFILM. Amélie, a young Belgian who spent her childhood in Japan, comes back to take a translator's post at a vast Tokyo corporation.
She signs a one-year contract dreaming of becoming truly Japanese, and the dream curdles into a slow slide down the office ladder. The harder she tries, the more she trips over unspoken rules, and her immediate boss — the glacially elegant Fubuki — keeps shifting her lower: from translation to photocopying, from photocopying to scrubbing the executive toilets. Sylvie Testud plays the humiliation almost gratefully, and the part won her a César.
Drawn from Amélie Nothomb's autobiographical novel, the film lives in close-up on Testud's face, where obedience, stubbornness and quiet mockery keep trading places. It's a needle-sharp comedy about corporate submission and two cultures talking past each other, where the funny and the cruel refuse to come apart. Stream Fear and Trembling (2003) online on iFILM.
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