At the same time, some of the funniest material is specifically satirical of the Japanese. This material is just as thin as in the brash entertainments above, but pointed: the movie really digs its needles into the Japanese corporate types. It's all heightened and so not literally believable (it's also unclear whether the working space is the product of inefficient corporate planning or inattentive movie production design), but at times it's wickedly amusing, when, for instance, Amélie, head bowed, says that much of Japanese history became understandable when she had to endure her boss's ear-splitting harangue, that a person would do anything to make it stop, invade Manchuria, crash a fighter plane into an American battleship, anything.

As a succession of stages on Amélie's bumpy road to the bottom, Fear and Trembling is somewhat scattered, held together by her narration and our sense that finally her heroism will take the retrospective form of writing that clever narration. But the movie also has a center, in the relationship of Amélie and her immediate supervisor, Fubuki Mori (Kaori Tsuji). Fubuki is a tall, marmoreal woman who at age 29 has devoted so much time and energy clawing her way to the middle that it's considered unlikely she'll ever marry. Amélie, a disheveled young woman with the sensitive comic expressiveness of a degree-holding troll, is utterly entranced by Fubuki's poised beauty and so fails to perceive that her attachment isn't shared by this ambitious junior executive who feels threatened by her subordinate's attainments and initiative.

Fubuki is a minor player in Yumimoto but that gives her enough power to degrade Amélie in Japanese-corporate terms. What Fubuki in her turn doesn't understand is the richness of Amélie's internal resources, which enable her to poeticize Fubuki even as Fubuki indulges her spite by demoting and belittling her. Whatever else you make think of these resources of Amélie's, they keep the movie from becoming a melodrama in which we ache for Fubuki to get her comeuppance. (She never gets it at work, though we're also specifically told she doesn't marry.)

All the same, Amélie cannot be talked out of confronting Fubuki, and these confrontations between them as the situation deteriorates are fascinating. The moviemakers don't fake them up dramatically at all--they resolve nothing. The point of them is that Amélie wants to express her feelings to Fubuki, to speak in a common language, and the movie dramatizes, with no hype or self-importance, the impossibility of stepping outside certain power dynamics to make yourself understood. In the Yumimoto hierarchy there's domination and submission, but for a Belgian girl there's really only submission.