Starring Toni Collette. In English and Japanese with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

When is a story not a story? The obvious answer might be, When nothing happens, dummkopf. But, as Samuel Beckett proved, nothing can be its own reward. While made with the best of intentions, no doubt, Japanese Story is certainly somewhere even below nothing: a thin slice of bogus life, inflated to suggest far more meaning than it can possibly carry.

I wish I could say at least that Toni Collette--a resourceful actor poorly served by Hollywood, by and large--gets to shine on home turf, in a tale set mostly in the Australian outback. But the truth is that, even though she's on-screen almost every minute, she's given little to do and she doesn't do it terribly well. Who would? The character she's handed at the outset, generically named geologist Sandy Edwards, is relationship-phobic, nasty to her friends and family, and incompetent at work. Things won't get much better.

We know all this because of clumsy exposition hurled at us in the first five minutes. The unlikable Sandy is sent by her company--whatever the hell it does--to accompany the young son of a Japanese business tycoon on a trip deep into the bush, where mining operations are going on. What these operations represent, aside from some randomly strewn facts and figures, and what these people mean to each other, are not exactly made clear.

The only point is that the pigheaded, generally pissed-off Sandy finds herself gradually drawn to the handsome, quietly arrogant Hiromitsu Tachibana (Gotaro Tsunashima, who is adequate). They squabble, they struggle, they kiss, and--guess what?--he's married.

Soon after the mismatched lovers reach their cultural rapprochement (startlingly similar to the one depicted in Clara Law's The Goddess of 1967), there's a plot turn that cannot fairly be described in print. Frankly, I don't think it was terribly well considered by director Sue Brooks and writer Alison Tilson, following up on their more charming, but similarly amateurish, debut film, 1997's Road to Nhill. Brooks merely sees this dramatic twist as an opportunity to milk rote emotions from Collette, and to drag another half-hour out of a short's worth of material. On paper, this Story must have looked like it was offering a diva role to its star, but Sandy Edwards is as forgettable in the last frame as she was in the first. And for the audience, that's a lot worse than never meeting her at all.