"Outsourced" is a low-budget no-stars romantic comedy about globalisation, improbable as that might seem. A young American executive is sent to India to run the company's call-centre. The clash of cultures--and the downright strangeness of India as seen through American eyes--provides the jokes. But there is no condescension, nor any fatuous admiration of the foreign for its own sake, which would have been equally annoying. Our hero struggles until he surrenders to his new environment, at which he falls for India and for his engaging Indian assistant. It sounds too sweet, but not at all. It is intelligent and wonderfully well-observed, as well as charming, and this frequent visitor to India, at any rate, lapped it up.
The reviews were good but not ecstatic. A few seemed to take offence at the very idea of an easy-going movie about life in the "trenches of globalisation" (as one miserable killjoy put it). Imagine making light of such horrors. In fact the movie neither glosses over nor exaggerates the human consequences of outsourcing. For me, it got that balance just right as well. With the possible exceptions of "Michael Clayton" and "No Country for Old Men", I enjoyed it more than anything else I saw in 2007. Matt Groening apparently loved it as well: enough said.
It has seemed to be getting a very limited US distribution all this year. See it if you can--you'll thank me. In the US, you can buy the DVD here.
