Apologies for the long post but this is something I found this morning on the film JOHN & JANE. Written by Indian writer Vivek Narayanan. An interesting read...
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 talking-heads 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.
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