The documentary John & Jane Toll-Free is billed as a provocative look at globalization and resultant confusion of cultural identity. Cinematically educated on the banks of the Hudson, the film’s director, Ashim Ahluwalia, returned to find his native megalopolis Bombay rechristened Mumbai and being transformed in the ‘90s into yet another indistinguishable international city. To chronicle this leveling, or homogenization, he fixed on the phenomenon of the international call center, in this case located in the nondescript modern “4th Dimension” building housing six-man teams of cubicled, computer-dependent 1/800- call reps. Their company photo-ID cards -- blood type included -- are shown to finger the three selected Jane and John Doe’s who sweet-talk to, solicit orders or extensions thereof from, console, advise and commiserate with, mostly cracker-accented Americans twelve time zones away.

Just as the film’s printed-title emphasis on time differences is unnecessary because the office has a prominent digital wall clock, so, too, are the confusing identity cards and showy time exposure b-shutter overheads of straight or undulating traffic arteries that resemble human blood circulation. Premièring here at the Film Society of Lincoln Center-Museum of Modern Art’s thirty-fifth New Directors/New Films after appearances at international festivals, the documentary is set for HBO/Cinemax broadcast next year, and that latter is indicative of the root of the problem, exacerbated by the more static 35mm. format (rather than shakier but mobile handheld video).

Even with its uneasy uncalled-for mix of office-fluorescent and neon color, the result could have been incisive but seems too straight to catch on to its own underpinning irony. Though loaded, “globalization” and “outsourcing” are in essence not so different from the rich’s traditional hiring of domestic help and chimney and street sweepers from across the tracks or across the seas. The lamentable fact in this particular film is not so much the practice but, rather, the gulf between what the hired hands -- the phone operators -- are saying to the client, and what they are doing or thinking as individuals. The few seconds of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Short Cuts diaper-changing phone-sex girl is worth all innocent eighty-six minutes here.

With often self-imposed Westernized names, and given go-getter classes in American accents, American mail-order catalogue mentality, and American values (“individualism,” “achievement and success,” “progress,” “happiness”) -- do they never take calls from London, Sydney or Singapore? -- these half-dozen call-center employees respond in different ways, and it is these varying reactions-defense mechanisms that would have made a better study.

Such reactions are here, but too much daytime lying in bed with stuffed animals, hypnotically participating in Christian church services or walking up alleys, shopping for clothing or fast food, silently rolling and smoking marijuana cigarettes, listening to money lectures from mother or gazing at strobe-lit disco couples, distracts from the potential effect. Stripped of such artsy dead-end interruptions, the call-service operators deal with the situation in several ways. There is fey Glen, polite on the job but hating it, obscene and bound by the relatively decent money; Vandana Malwe renamed Valerie and then Nikki Cooper, finds in it an Amway vocation to help clients only slightly less lonely and searching than she; Nikesh become Nicholas admires and imitates America and its “great English,” does “not want to be an Indian any more,” and is sorry he no longer works the same shift as Sofia, whom he met, wooed and wed on the job; Oaref is now Osmond and sees this as a step on the way to billions, to Elvis, motorcycles, luxury cars and Vegas mansions, while aloof, “very Americanized” Namrata now Naomi is obsessed with her being “totally naturally blonde” and finding a similarly complexioned male.

Trying so hard to be what they believe “American,” they cannot realize the pathetic desolation of their disembodied clients, frequently elderly pensioners unable to afford even the basics. Following the screening, other viewers voiced dissatisfaction at this country’s outsourcing jobs to cheap Third World labor. What they, and the film, fail to see, is the disparity between economic and virtual reality, money and dreams, what one is but unrealistically longs to be. These phone people are duped, of course, even if their wages are okay by local standards, but they are spiritually no worse off than their equally sad listeners. 

(Released by HBO Documentary Films; not rated by MPAA.)