If Ayesha Dharker and the Kamasutra are waiting for me on the other side, outsource me up, Spock
Newcomer writer/director John Jeffcoat is making a mini-splash with what could be the next big thing in “up the corporation” comedies. Even better, it is a romantic comedy with comely Ayesha Dharker providing the on-screen chemistry. Hamilton’s character Todd has graduated from college, probably like Hamilton’s previous character Grover in “Kicking and Screaming,” and has gravitated into the kind of dead end job that made “Office Space” famous. As in the latter flick, outsourcing is rearing its ugly head in the form of shipping customer service jobs to (where else?) India.
As the film points out, everything that can be handled via phone or e-mail is being re-birthed on another continent and connected to the American pots of gold by satellite umbilicals. The workers Todd supervises will be the first to go and he will be next, that is, unless, he travels to India to train his replacement. So the plot goes, if he toes the line he will get his retirement and if he doesn’t he will live in a cardboard box.
This is only the first of more than a few sophomoric mistakes made by Mr. Jeffcoat and co-writer George Wing, but we are given notice in the first few shots of dreamy Seattle that we are expected to suspend disbelief here (after all, it isn’t raining….).
Traveling to India, Todd makes mistakes dumber than any of us ever made going anywhere overseas, even in high school. Of course, his boss is even dumber. But that’s not the point. The point is that even though his girlfriend has dumped him and is sleeping with another guy when he calls and his corporate structure treats him like an indentured servant he stills loves the USA. That is, until he meets Asha, played by seductive Dharker. Between Asha’s homework on the Kamasutra and a neighborhood full of Indians who look and act more like North Carolinians, Josh learns that maybe the best things in life aren’t stock options.
Josh is going to train Purohit (Asif Basra) to be the next supervisor of the order fulfilment (sic) department that will soon have its one and only call center in a small town about a hundred miles from Bombay. The very repeating of the department title of “order fulfillment” becomes funny after a while, at least for those in the audience with the patience to let it grow on them. But the new position, paying mountains of rupees a year, is the promise of a dream come true for Purohit. He needs it to marry the love of his life; a love as dear as the love Todd lost while he was abandoning his stateside life in favor of a customer fulfillment career.
So Asha is not only the symbol of a different perspective, a kinder gentler capitalism, but she is the start of something great. Parents never fear, the film treads lightly when it wonders anywhere near the sexual. In one of the most amazing shows of modesty on the contemporary screen, Asha actually has clothes on in bed with Todd. The fact that she behaves more like a Hollywood starlet than a promised Indian bride will probably be glossed over by the average American watching the film. She is at least as virtuous as the girl next door. At least the girl next door in New York. Or Seattle.
The film misses a couple great angles, like the 50” flat screen of Todd’s dreams to which Purohit is completely hip, but which never materializes. That would have been a great twist to have come back over the wall as Todd hands out his daily alms. In the end, if everybody doesn’t get what they want, they get what they need. The final twist is good hearted and clean-cut fun; as touching as it is believable. What goes around comes around.
