Outsourced

Todd manages a call centre for a company in Seattle. One day the company moves the whole operation to India. He is given a task: to go there, train the team and bring the average call time below a set number of minutes. He arrives and nothing is as he expected. The team cannot follow what the customers say, has never seen the products, and nothing he explains lands. After a while he drops his own method and adopts theirs. John Jeffcoat directs. Josh Hamilton plays Todd. The subject is the relocation of work: at the start of the two thousands American companies commonly moved customer service to India, and the narrative treats that from inside. The humour comes from both sides failing to understand the other, and the film is not one sided; Todd is made as ridiculous as the team. It was shot in India on location for a small budget. A television series was later made from the same premise. Its limit is the romantic strand; that line turns into genre and is the weakest part. Some of the cultural observation stays thin and India is built as a place where a lesson is learned. Who it is for: viewers who like small scale comedy and narratives about business. Who it is not for: some observations are clichés, the romance is weak, and the ending ties up easily.