IN JAPAN, IT'S SAYONARA DREAM JOB, HELLO CRUEL BOSSES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

`FEAR AND Trembling'' is harrowing and hilarious. A comedy of cultural incomprehension like no other, it dives riskily deep into presumed stereotypes, then comes out the other end as an embracing act of near-impossible understanding.

Based on a well-regarded, semi-autobiographical novel by Amelie Nothomb, the film is told from the unraveling viewpoint of a young Belgian woman, also named Amelie, who at the start of the movie is expecting to live out a long-cherished dream. Raised in Japan for her first five years, Amelie has nothing but happy memories of the place, and she's totally psyched to get a translator job at a Tokyo multinational.

But Amelie, who is played by the waiflike yet surprisingly steely Sylvie Testud, is in for a rude reality check. Utterly unprepared for the kind of ritualized degradation that is standard practice for molding a loyal Japanese employee, Amelie can't understand why the linguistic skills she was hired for are ignored - and at one point, even characterized as a liability she should suppress - while she's saddled with menial copying tasks (and derided for not performing them well).

This is upsetting, but somewhat tolerable coming from the middle ranks of male managers in the airless office tower. But it becomes intolerable when her direct supervisor, the beautiful Miss Fubuki Mori (Kaori Tsuji), whom Amelie has some kind of crush on, takes punishment for the Western incompetent's breaches of workplace etiquette to sadistic extremes.

Or does she? Amelie, who has winsomely (if dangerously) confused her self-aggrandizing impulses with a sense of instinctive Japanese-ness for most of her life, could use a good mental shake-up.

Nevertheless, there will be some who see racism in director Alain Corneau's portrayal of Asian businessfolk as, for the most part, cruel automatons. I would suggest that such outrage, in this admittedly sticky situation, might blind a viewer to the peculiar humanity Corneau draws out of all his characters.

And remember, we're seeing everybody through Amelie's far-from-realistic perspective (like that other French-speaking movie heroine of the same name, this one has a tendency to take off on virtual flights of fancy). It's a tour-de-force performance by Testud - she even took a two-month Japanese language crash course for the role. But ``Fear and Trembling'' does anything but shrug off these foreign others as ``Lost in Translation'' unknowables.

What Amelie finds in her failure to comprehend Japan is a deeper knowledge of the individuals she locks horns with, and of the strengths and limitations her own self-image had hidden from her.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

FEAR AND TREMBLING - Three stars

(Not rated: language, nudity, violence)

Starring: Sylvie Testud, Kaori Tsuji, Taro Suwa, Bison Katayama, Sokyu Fujita.

Director: Alain Corneau.

Running time: 1 hr. 42 min.

Playing: One Colorado, Pasadena; Music Hall, Beverly Hills.

In a nutshell: Belgian woman's dream job at a Tokyo corporation turns into a nightmare of degradation. Rich characterizations make this more than a typical culture clash. In French and Japanese with English subtitles.