Call Center Girl isn't really about a call center. To take this further, it isn't really concerned with any issues that a real human being might encounter. Whenever it gets close to any sort of verisimilitude, it instead veers into wackiness. It’s all just a bunch of wacky misunderstandings that really could be addressed if people were just able to talk for a second. That wackiness might have worked, except for the fact that the film still makes play for open sentiment. It falls terribly flat, the film succumbing to the awkwardness of its tone.
Teresa (Pokwang) returns home after thirteen years of working on cruise ships. In that time her youngest daughter Regina has built up a lot of resentment over her abandonment issues. Teresa sees her chance to reconnect with Regina by getting a job to help pay for her placement fee for a job in the UK. The job she gets is coincidentally in the same call center that Regina works at. But their proximity only causes more tension, especially as Regina comes to believe that her mother is flirting with their team leader Vince (Enchong Dee).
This story could actually take place in any other workplace. The call center milieu just seems to be a naked attempt at relevance. But relevance calls for some measure of realism, and the film is unable to provide even the smallest inkling of truth in its antics. It amplifies small problems into melodrama, disregarding the ability of humans to talk to each other and explain things. The second half of the film is mainly concerned with Regina misconstruing Teresa’s motherly relationship with Vince as something sexual. Because she apparently has the comprehension of a five-year-old.
The film tries to sell this as a piece of personal tragedy, her suspicion of her mother stemming from not being able to really get to know her. But the film does a terrible job of selling that conflict. There’s no real drama in it, because one side is absolutely wrong and the other is absolutely right. The film can only deal with problems in these cartoonishly simple terms. It only gets dumber, the film actually going as far as providing a villain for the story. This results in a really terrible climax that pushes the film far beyond the realm of reality.
And that’s the thing, really. The film goes through the trouble of situating the film in real situations. Teresa is an OFW who’s been away from her children. She and her daughter end up working in the cutthroat BPO industry. But in the end, very little of that milieu actually matters, because it’s the antics that take precedent. Pokwang is a talented performer, but her skills are largely wasted here. Jessy Mendiola is unable to acquit herself for her character’s utter lack of depth. And Enchong Dee never gets to decide what his character actually is.
Call Center Girl feels like it was toseed together in a couple of weeks. It is as if a higher-up just decided one day that the studio needed a movie set in a call center. And so a previously shelved script was suddenly reworked into this mess of a film. The shoddiness of the production lends further credence to this hypothesis, and a reference to Freddie Aguilar’s recent troubles adds even more evidence. There’s no way to be sure that this is actually what happened, but it seems entirely plausible given the final product. Regardless, everyone deserves better than this.
