John & Jane (Institutional Use)

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John & Jane (Institutional Use) Review

Ashim Ahluwalia's John and Jane is, at first pass, a film essay that closely follows
the very different trajectories of six call centre workers--"Glen", "Sydney",
"Nikki", "Osmond", "Nicholas", "Naomi"--while they talk across the Atlantic to (in
this case) American "customers" who are barely aware of their existence.
In other words, a familiar, even tired, subject for chatter; the newspapers both in
India and in the West have, for some time, been awash with talk of BPOs,
columnists have sung paeans to the industry and labour researchers have
condemned it; politicians have taken, and switched, their positions on whether it
is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, and large parts of rural and semi-rural India are
now learning English with the hope of becoming part of it. However, the fact of
all this chatter, all this micro-opinion, will unfortunately only serve to cloud and
distract from the actual place and ambition of John and Jane; for Ahluwalia--from
his very first frame in which we see a shot of New York's Times Square that is
both alluring and terrifying, from the very first murmur of the stunning
soundtrack--is playing for much higher stakes. This is not, in the end, a film
about the merits and demerits of a particular industry, but a very personal and
visionary document of an epochal global transformation. It is a document, a
fiction, an allegory, a work of art, that will resonate and continue to reveal its
meanings for years to come.

Ahluwalia's subject is, on the one hand, the question (to borrow from Walter
Benjamin's critique of Weber) of capitalism as a religion, sourced, in the present
context, ultimately from the idea of America; and running parallel to this is
another motif, both intriguing and disturbing, about the extreme plasticity of the
contemporary self. Ahluwalia's "characters" are real call-centre employees, but
they seem to be constantly narrating and performing themselves for the camera,
in a series of scenes that seem to hover ambiguously between the staged and the
improvised. Many of them are estranged from or without families, and they set
about completely reconstructing their self towards their fantasy of what they
could be, with results that are, by turns, melancholy, bittersweet, upbeat,
liberating (perhaps), tragic and even grotesque.

What is being left behind is the old world of industrial Mumbai, whose remnants
are indicated early in the film by a lovely panorama of smokestacks and smoke.
The characters in John and Jane are turning away from this, towards a new
hyper-modern existence, and they are also, it seems, revising themselves
towards America. Although it's true that by the end of the movie the India
around them has itself changed so dramatically it is not clear who is emulating
who, at any rate, even Glen, the bitter and disenchanted pot-smoking slacker
whom art audiences will perhaps most easily identify with, dreams of modelling
for Versace. This transformation may well begin in the coaching classes when
prospective employees are shown catalogues full of pristine, seductively
organized commodities and the American supermarket ("more choice") is
contrasted with the supposedly chaotic Indian bazaar, when roomfuls of hopefuls
are coached towards Texan accents. Eventually, however, things like accents and
baseball turn out to effect the more superficial of changes. Much deeper,
however, go the arrows of the character's own aspirations as they try to take
control over their lives. The call centre job is seen, in every case, as merely a
stepping stone: Sydney is from a lower-middle class background and wants to be
a professional dancer; Oaref ("Osmond") hoards management books like Bibles
and plans every minute of his day towards his dream of being a billionaire from
pyramid marketing; Nikki reconstructs herself, joins an evangelical church, and
tries to administer a kind of redemption through shopping ("Have a nice day") in
her phone calls to frazzled American customers; Namrata ("Naomi") invents
blondeness as a state of being, dyes her hair, eyebrows, even eyelashes blond
and insists that she is a "totally natural blonde" looking, ultimately, for a blond (in
spirit) guy. Through all this, there is the persistent melancholy of a job with odd
hours, close and intense surveillance (the latter indicated through a subtle
montage of surveillance camera shots) and sometimes years of daytime sleep;
that night is reigning spirit of this movie is clear from the recurring, vivid and
futuristic shots of Mumbai glistening in the dark.

If this is the future of work and living in India, John and Jane makes it clear that
it also cuts both ways, all the way back to America. If the film etches its visible
characters in sharp and memorable ways, it is also equally precise and
compassionate about its invisibles, the faceless Americans on the other end of the
line whom we know only by their voices. At the beginning of the film they seem
impatient and unwilling to treat the Indian employees as "persons", but by the
end of the film, going through to Naomi's job that appears to involve credit card
checks, we see another side to the Americans--lonely, profoundly vulnerable,
disconnected, trying to save pennies from their dwindling salary or social security
cheques, sometimes practically unable to conceive of irreversible transformations
in a world outside of their home state.

The storytelling, then, is memorable, but the structure of the film and its assured
editing is not driven by dramatic action but by the unfolding vision of its last
invisible character, the filmmaker himself. Ahluwalia has evolved a distinctive
and assured style that reads against the grain of the conventional social
documentary, referencing more--in his use of light, colour and sound--the
fantastical visual world of science-fiction/horror dystopias. The usual talkingheads
approach of the actuality film is eschewed for a combination of a few
carefully composed silent portraits and dramatic, fixed, wide-angle shots,
suffused with depth and contradiction, that set the characters into their larger
environments. Ahluwalia thus approaches his footage and structure in such a
way as to evoke a world of fantasy, desire and nightmare, as much as "reality", a
dream world whose inhabitants are often sleeping. Through this, he reaches far
out of the limiting space of the documentary as defined by public broadcasting
and the NGO world, avoiding, with a relief, the disastrous trap of the
"docudrama". John and Jane is exemplary in its delineation of an experimental
aesthetic that does not either dumb itself down or turn its back to the general
viewer.

Finally, what is interesting is that all of this is specifically made possible and
accentuated by the choice of 35 mm film. There is a very deliberate choice of
and allegiance to film here, against the improvised or post-production aesthetic of
some video, and the specific ability of film to completely engulf and absorb the
viewer is pushed as far as it might go. John and Jane proves that film does have
a future.

� 2007 Vivek Narayanan

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