We may lament the atomisation of our
society through technology, as we socialise on Facebook, work out on
Wii and soundtrack our lives with iPods; others, however, embrace it.
Anupama Chandrasekhar is the dramatist of India’s embrace. Her
Free Outgoing, which
premièred at the Royal Court in 2007, showed a societal scandal
provoked by a virally circulated video shot on a mobile phonecam. Now
Disconnect follows a team of
operatives for a credit-card company’s telephone debt collection
operation in Illinois... except that “Illinois” is a windowless room on
the fourth floor of a call centre in Chennai. The callers construct
American identities for themselves: Giri becomes Gary, Vidya is Vicki,
and Ross (
né Roshan)
doesn’t even drop his Stateside accent when he’s offline.
It’s a
Glengarry Glen Ross
for our times: we hear the practised pitches, see the struggle to stay
above water as payments secured by each caller are marked up on a board
in pursuit of the ludicrously high targets that will secure the
centre’s renewal of the card company’s contract in the run-up to the
Fourth of July, and we witness how neither going by the book nor taking
an individual line is a winning strategy. Supervisor Avinash (the
ever-fine Paul Bhattacharjee) follows the manual in all respects, but
this has already earned him a demotion from “New York” and it certainly
fails to motivate his underlings. Ross (an assured professional stage
début from Nikesh Patel) tries to cultivate a personal footing
with his “marks”, but when his own version of the American Dream leads
him to get
too personal in
one case, his misjudgement sets off a corporate avalanche.
Chandrasekhar has a fine ear for dialogue, and pulls off a number of
sequences in which all three callers work their respective lines
simultaneously. The big picture is rather fuzzier, though: the
real/virtual identity matter yields a number of nice moments and
observations but no defined thesis, and locating the building next to a
giant landfill site isn’t the subtlest of symbols. The inherently
static nature of the “action”, too, gives director Indhu Rubasingham
nothing to work with, reducing her to making improbable changes of the
configuration of the desks on John Napier’s box set between scenes. But
Chandrasekhar has nous and ambition, and is worth watching at the very
least.
Written for the Financial
Times.