NY Times
John & Jane Toll-Free
 Directed by Ashim Ahluwalia
6 p.m. today, Museum of Modern Art; Thursday 8:45 p.m., Walter Reade Theater

Behind the polite voices with Indian accents selling goods and services to Americans from a giant call center in Bombay are real people with real lives wearing headsets that plug them in to the American dream. Because of the time difference between the United States and South Asia, the peak hours for this grueling 14-hour-a-day outsourced labor are after midnight. The HBO documentary follows six young Indian telemarketers, who are given assumed American names, drilled in English pronunciation and indoctrinated in American popular culture.
More impressionistic than pointedly journalistic, the disquieting movie looks with a raised eyebrow at the grass-roots creation of workaholic, robotically friendly sales workers eager to shed their national identity. One or two rebel, but the majority, who are paid a fourth of what an American would get for the same work, enthusiastically embrace their career opportunities. The most extreme eager beaver sleeps while playing motivational tapes, cites Elvis Presley and Engelbert Humperdinck as his role models and naïvely announces his determination to be a billionaire. STEPHEN HOLDEN

Also see excellent reviews in Slant Magazine and in Spiegel Online.

A beach blonde Indian call center worker. From Spiegel Online: “Ahluwalia’s call center workers are living virtual lives over the electronic signal exchange as self-created avatars, basking in the blue glow of monitors at the call center in the futuristic ‘Fourth Dimension’ building in Mumbai. ‘It reminds me of one of those 1970s science fiction B movies you would see as a kid, like ‘Brainstorm’,’ he says. ‘Their lives are closer to science fiction.’”

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