NEW Outsourced (DVD)

This film is impossible not to like. Charming and witty without being full of belly laughs, it tells the story of one Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton), a customer service manager who is "outsourced" to India to train Indian service reps in the ways of American culture. As one would expect, the teacher becomes the student, quickly learning the ways of Indian culture. Jeffcoat, who also co-wrote the film, steers a clever course between the Scylla of cultural condescension and the Charybdis of romanticizing Indian society: we see the colour and spice alongside the filth and poverty of India. Helping "Mr. Toad" (as the Indians refer to him at first) is local beauty Asha (Ayesha Dharker), a strong-willed woman who has one foot in traditional Hindu culture and another in modernity, much like India as a whole. The last scene in the film (not giving away too much) was almost a carbon copy of the final scene in Bill Forsyth's brilliant 1983 comedy Local Hero, also about an uptight American businessman who goes to a foreign land (in the case of the earlier film, the northern coast of Scotland) with preconceived ideas, only to learn a gentler, more karmic way of living - I suspect that Local Hero was the inspiration for Jeffcoat's Outsourced. And there's a gentle but clear critique of the corporate greed associated with outsourcing to boot, and of the American consumer's complicity in it: at one point Asha asks an American customer on the phone if he's be willing to pay $200 more for domestically made kitsch - he, of course, takes the cheaper foreign-made product. Hamilton and Dharker have good chemistry together: their romance seems real, not something out of a Bollywood musical or a Hollywood blockbuster. Though it's no Citizen Kane, there's nothing bad one can say about Outsourced: it's a perfect little indie gem telling the story of how culture shock isn't all that shocking.