Élise Girard's "Sidonie in Japan" is playing at the Martha's Vineyard Film Center. Sidonie, played by the beautiful, vulnerable, and elusive Isabelle Huppert, is leaving France for Japan, where she has been invited for a book tour -- a celebration of the republication of her first novel. Sidonie is greeted by the soft-spoken Kenzo, superbly played by Tsuyoshi Ihara.

The film, as enigmatic as Huppert, unfolds calmly with a modern, spare, Japanese aesthetic, with inflections of lively comic moments.

Kenzo flusters Sidonie with his polite but poised Japanese etiquette; he carries all of her bags, including her purse, slung over his shoulder. He chaperones her everywhere, a silent shadow, answering questions with the fewest words possible. The meeting of French/Japanese culture creates its own situational dialogue.

As her book tour unfolds, and Sidonie gives interviews, the story does too. We learn that her entire life is informed by terrible loss in car accidents. The first, when she lost her mother, father, and brother when she was a child. The second -- her husband. Asked about the loss of her family and husband, Sidonie replies, "I ended up alone, in total solitude, as if I had fallen down a hole. I was scared. But even then, the book was inspired by my story. It isn't an autobiography. It's fiction."

A reporter asks if writing heals: "It doesn't heal, but perhaps it helped me survive that time." With her husband now dead, though, Sidonie is no longer able to write. "It gathered all my strength just to keep standing. Time passed, and I didn't realize I wasn't writing. Years flew by. Trying again, I find it unbearable."

Kenzo speaks about the impact of his quiet demeanor when, as the two begin to have moments of connection, he tells Sidonie that he and his wife hardly speak. "It's because I'm absent and boring." He, too, is haunted by tragic deaths in his family.

Each of their losses saps the two of life. But the first glimmer of change comes when, after Sidonie expresses having survived both crashes without a scratch, Kenzo urges, "You are alive. You must accept it."

A few days after the stimulation of being in Japan, the experience of everything so new compared with Europe, Sidonie finds herself crying. Kenzo tells her not to, but she responds, "I feel modified. All this newness is overwhelming ... They are tears of joy, not sadness."

The scenes, whether the relatively muted ones of the cities, airports, and hotels -- or the lingering, lush, gorgeous colors of the country's natural attractions -- are elegantly simple. They are largely devoid of people, echoing the quiet nature of the film.

That is until Antoine, Sidonie's deceased husband, begins appearing as a ghost at odd moments. At first, Sidonie is almost comically disconcerted. But Antoine's ghost sets up a deep longing for their lost love. She becomes frustrated by their inability to connect.

Admitting to Kenzo that she is seeing her husband's ghost, he is unsurprised. They are elemental to Japanese culture. "We all have some kind of relationship with the deceased," Kenzo says. "Some see them, others feel them. The visible and invisible world coexist. It's like that for us Japanese. Ghosts help us live."