Hello hello hello? Yeh kya hai, boss?

Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller One Night At The Call Centre is converted on celluloid to One Excruciating Night At A Call Centre. The six much-loved characters have a back projection to their lives before they accumulate at a call-centre run by boss Dalip Tahil who dreams sings and performs bodily functions based on his migration to Boston.

The call -centre resembles a large Ekta Kapoor set for a Saas-Bahu serial. Those at least are less dead at the centre. Crammed into this word-space of telephonic babble are a betrayed wife (Amrita Arora), a girl (Gul Panag) who’s being forced by her singing-dancing-demented mother to marry an NRI, a mixed-up frazzled neurotic chick (Isha Koppiker) who could’ve been Kangana Ranaut in her last life, a senior citizen (Sharad Saxena) who’s been deserted by his son, and two guys Sharman Joshi and Sohail Khan who don’t seem to know what they want.

Frankly, neither does this film. Hello seems to make and unmake up its mind about the characters faster than we can keep up with their mind space.

What works within a novel’s format need not work as a film. The characters seem thoroughly unassimilated, scattered and go every which way that the woozy screenplay takes them. After a while we just give up trying to make sense of the jumble of characters and their problems. Maybe a call-centre to provide a centre to these call-centre-ists?

Attempts to recreate a call-centre atmosphere are restricted to random shots of distressed gori ladies, like the one who asks one of our protagonists why she can’t wash her bras in the dish washer (talk about existential dilemma) and a guy on a plane who insults India precipitating a patriotic harangue from Sohail who incidentally swings like a celluloid Tarzan from comic virtuosity to outbursts of incendiary indignation. Sohail as always is what keeps us from walking out.

Staging a walk-out would be the mildest form of protest for this urbane atrocity. What Anurag Basu achieved effortlessly in Life In A Metro is here reduced to a mocking pantomime of urbane angst.

The film goes from fretful episodes mimicking the saucy witticism of the American series Friends, to a cheaply ironic shot at Conversations With God when our group of muddled call-centre suburban malfunctionaries nearly topple over and plunge to their death and are rescued by, ha ha, God.

God saves these kinks. But who will save this weird look-see at longings and eccentricities of people who would rather be unhappy than happy?

A few redeeming moments (like the time when Amrita Arora connects with her long-distance husband and finds out about his extra-marital affair) cannot salvage this hip-and-non-happening disaster, probably the worst film you’ll see this year.

But then who knows what danger lurks around the corner?