In her 2004 documentary The Beauty Academy Of Kabul, Liz Mermin captured a moment of profound simultaneous
culture clash and symbiosis, as a group of American hairdressers opened a
beauty school in Afghanistan. The Americans' arrogant obsession with
superficialities was slyly entertaining, but it was clear that their
students—women emerging from sharia law, and trying to earn a living and
reclaim their femininity—took their classes as serious business. They
needed their teachers, even if they didn't necessarily embrace the cultural
messages that accompanied them.
Mermin tries
to capture a similar scenario in Office Tigers, a new
documentary about an outsourcing company in Chennai, India; launched by two
American go-getters to supply cheap, 24-hour office-support services to
companies worldwide, it plunks 3,000 people into a dispiriting cubicle farm and
cheers them on with rah-rah team-building and expectations of long hours and
high productivity. Mermin focuses on co-founder Joseph Sigelman, as he tours
the facility asking people why they aren't wearing ties, lectures managers
about cutting dead weight, and maintains a pasted-on salesman's smile during a
seemingly never-ending round of team-building parties and rallies. She also
talks to various managers, who spout depressing corporate cant about the
importance of 20-hour work days and boundless company loyalty. Bubbling under
the surface is a predictable tension between managers and employees: As with Beauty
Academy, the locals need the American-run company, with its promises of
financial self-sufficiency and success, but they don't necessarily need the
shallow, overbearing culture that comes with it.
But while
Mermin captures a great many hilariously uncomfortable managerial moments à la The
Office, she never pins down how this firm is different from any others,
or how the predictable tensions relate to the locale. And while she dedicates
most of her samey footage to the managers' lockstepped perspective, she gets
very little meaningful response from the employees. Mostly, they just sit
around looking uncomfortable as the managers talk, though it's unclear whether
that's because they know they're being fed bullshit, or because they don't want
their responses to it captured on camera by strangers. Possibly Office
Tigers' best moment comes when a group of trainees interrupt a
long-winded seminar on motivation to explain that no, honestly, people don't
get job satisfaction from a wide range of stimuli, they just want money. Like
much of Office Tigers, it doesn't say much that's new and exciting, but
it's a rare moment of cards-on-the-table honesty, which is in short supply in
big corporations all around the world.
Key features: None.