2009, 150 min. Not Rated, but only some strongish language to concernThe 73rd Virgin says... This begins with charming energy, introducing us to Harpreet Singh Bedi, a Sikh who has just graduated and is determined to become a successful computer salesman. He lives in Mumbai with his loving father or grandfather, couldn’t tell which, who gently scolds him for working too hard and worrying too much. Harpreet goes to work for AYS (At Your Service) Computers and is almost instantly disavowed of any notion of holding on to his rigid ethics in the world of sales. Here he meets a figure recognized the world over: the hot receptionist who really runs the place. She is married and won’t be a love interest. Nice touch.
Potential clients quietly insist on kickbacks, their own service department (one soft-core porn-addicted dude with no desk phone) re-seats a video card and charges the customer 5000 rupees telling him he “fried his motherboard”, sales targets and incentives are constantly shifting, and all of his 20 or so fellow salesmen, and one woman, are constantly guarding their turf and are almost hateful to newcomers. Here is excerpted his “field induction” or one-day training.
Hapreet admirably refuses to give a customer a kickback, and things begin to fall apart. Now treated as a pariah and not allowed to visit any clients, chided by his coworkers and showered with paper airplanes (thus “Rocket”), he has time on his hands. From talking with suppliers and his service department, he realizes that AYS’s huge markup and miserable service could easily be undercut. Here he celebrates his first illicit sale with his grandfather, under the softly judging eyes of God.
Only after being brutally insulted by his boss one last time does he bend his ethics enough to start a hidden company within AYS.
And that’s about it. For the first hour or so it’s fast and funny and interesting to a foreigner. There are a lot of funny and, to Western eyes, jarring juxtapositions of traditional and modern life. The language is exhausting as it veers between 70% Hindi and 30% English with the English spoken so fast and either slurred or clipped as to be another language. Every word is subtitled and needs it, but I didn’t mind at all. It’s (patronization alert) charming.
But as soon as he takes on a few coworkers, it slows waaaaay down and becomes more of a polite but insistent plea for honesty and good business practices. One can imagine it being quoted at business self-help seminars like “Field of Dreams” was endlessly, in the dark and lost 90s. A few lyrical montages with soaring music and a few simplistic examples of how to gain and keep customers with honesty and hard work, and pretty soon it doesn’t really feel like a comedy, or at least a ‘merican comedy, any more. This is probably a mismatch between my expectations and what the movie wanted to be. I wanted more funny, fast-talkin’ Indians, dammit.
The ending is sweet and positive. My wife noticed that in the end the cross-section of characters we are supposed to be rooting for appears to be a multi-ethnic, multi-religion, multi-gender, maybe multi-caste (out of my depth there). Its heart is in the right place but it sure beats a long time. IMDB says it’s 150 minutes, Netflix says 132. Coming off some minor surgery, I didn’t notice who was right (they’re both wrong – 154), but between the Vicodin for the pain and the caffeine for the Vicodin, I was wantin’ it to finish up.
Nice, but only nice.
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