The further pleasure of these confrontations is watching the two actresses face off in Japanese. (Testud is reported to have learned the language for this movie in a matter of two months.) Testud and Tsuji speak a common language but their body languages are entirely different, which is not to say they're untranslatable. Testud has a wonderful way of registering the impact of unfamiliar Japanese customs not just with her eyes but with her neck muscles, as if she were being knocked in the forehead at every misstep. As Fubuki, Tsuji literally and figuratively looks down on Testud, and though she mostly remains still, she pushes her barbs home by swiveling her head, as if she had a bobbling universal joint at the base of her skull. The impact of their scenes doesn't just come from our understanding that the two characters mean such different things by intelligence and obedience and honor. It also comes from seeing the contrast between Testud's frank gaze, the way she simultaneously seems open to and unprepared for everything, and Tsuji's iciness, which is forbidding enough when it's opaque but even more horrible when it becomes translucent.

Whether Fubuki accurately represents a Japanese professional woman's outlook or not, Tsuji puts the character as written over Amélie's net in one unreturnable serve after another. Tsuji comes close to expressing herself in disdain as witheringly, exclusively, and fully as Bill Murray or Kevin Spacey at their most bilious. And like Murray and Spacey she does it in a comic idiom. But in her final encounter with Fubuki, Amélie finally has the insight that she can control the situation by playing into it rather than fighting it. Amélie thus submits to Fubuki's authority so abjectly she gives her an "orgasm." (That is, Amélie approaches Fubuki with the fear and trembling formerly held to be the appropriate attitude with which to approach the emperor.) The basic insight is that at some point the mania for control becomes indistinguishable from its opposite, which becomes apparent in this increasingly wacky scene as Amélie whets Fubuki's greedy appetite for further admissions of incompetence and even retardation.

The movie would probably strike American audiences as very "French." Amélie has such a personal literary take on her experiences that she doesn't take them personally, in the way we usually mean that; her rewards lie outside the scope of institutional recognition of sincere effort. Her range of speculation may also seem strange to anyone unfamiliar with far-left feminist theory, e.g., that a male superior's treatment of women is like rape. (At the same time, Fear and Trembling is nothing like Secret Things Jean-Claude Brisseau's stupefying and unendurable S/M phantasmagoria about Parisian corporate life.) But Amélie and Fubuki are "sisters" only in the most unidealized sense: they can't stop fighting or escape from each other.