Fear and Trembling

It's hard to say what makes this movie so likeable. Think of a Japanese version of Office Space: humiliating, unfunny, sadistic. Then add a Belgian who wants to be God, will settle for being Jesus, but ends up cleaning toilets. Doesn't sound very good, does it? For some reason, it is.

Mostly I don't like voiceovers, unless, as in Badlands or A Clockwork Orange, they complicate rather than clarify their content. In Fear and Trembling, Sylvie Testud's inner commentary keeps the movie from slipping into the thoughtless formulae of the fish-out-of-water story, and, even better, fractures it like a cubist's cosmos, spinning each detail freshly from the narrator's mental universe, refusing to weave the world together in a knit-pattern. That's good. We feel the conflict between cultures only in Testud's reaction to it, in her desire both to assimilate and to transcend. Like most desires, hers is improbable and destructive. But by settling for less situational illustrations of culture-clash, Alain Corneau, the director, can explore our misunderstandings without turning them into spectacle or, worse, morals to be learned.

For her role as the understated Amelie, Testud won some fancy award, which she certainly deserved. But the work's greatest strength lies in its entirely real, but beyond real, presentation of the problem. By counterposing the dreary bureaucratic machine against our narrator's easy, creative defiance of it--by submitting to it--remember the grandfather's words in Invisible Man?--Corneau lends his film the power and logic of a waking-dream: controlled and rational but free and dissociative. That effect opens the object up to its audience. It's been about an hour since it ended, and I can still feel the movie running through my mind, testing me, playing with me. Even after it's over, it insists that it isn't finished. That's a fair metric, I think, by which to judge its success.

However, B+, because, despite everything above, the movie too often turns to hyperbole when smaller rhetorical moves would suffice.