A documentary from last year called John and Jane is making film festival news again, this time at the Berlin Film Festival. The movie follows six Indian call center workers over three years. The title refers to the Anglo-American names agents gave themselves.
The Bombay-based director Ashim Ahluwalia told an Australian news service that the movie wasn't really about business process outsourcing, saying, "John and Jane is more about the need for everyone to become a hybrid American. It's like that in India and I think the whole world is becoming like that."
Mr. Ahluwalia continued, "The film is about what it means to be Indian in the 21st century. I didn't mean to make a portrait of the middle class. But they represent the direction India is going in." He went on, "They shape our taste and our aesthetics and in some ways, without meaning to they end up shaping our identities. John and Jane is that fantasy of where we want to be as a country. We don't want to see cows on the street any more."
Writing for new age doctor Deepak Chopra's blog collective IntentBlog, Toronto-based filmmaker Mohit Rajhans called the movie one of the best documentaries he's seen in a while. He quoted the Toronto Film Festival's write up from last September:
"As part of their training, they learn the meanings that work, money and God hold for Americans. In classes that could be read as satire or tragedy, they study shopping flyers as though they were textbooks. Some begin to adopt American values as their own. One dreams of buying his own Spanish-style villa. Another notes, "Everyone who's ever gone to America gets rich." When their shifts end, Glen and Sydney go back to traditional Indian homes, with simple amenities and mothers who urge them to eat."
A review from Variety praised the movie's use of 35mm film (instead of video) and its high, security camera-like angles. Reviewer Robert Koehler notes, "Snippets of pronunciation classes are ironic, given the pic's use of English subtitling for the heavily accented English dialogue." Koehler laments the film's lack of ideology, saying "it fails to provide a greater understanding of the hot-button issue of outsourcing."
