ritwikabanerjee

It is one of the gems which are made by Rituparno Ghosh. And this is the 3rd time i'm watching the movie. All the actors are brilliant and also a film which is very much relatable by everyone.

Asha Jaoar Majhe (Labour of Love) directed by Aditya Vikram Sengupta opens in a mysterious way. One morning, a woman dressed in a starched, mustard coloured cotton sari walks through narrow lanes of a middle class neighborhood of Kolkata, then boards a tram and finally switches to a bus, where she eats a small piece of cake for breakfast, and eventually completes her long journey. Meanwhile, a man dressed up as if he is ready to go out, drinks tea, then slowly removes his clothes, as he gets ready to take a bath. He washes his dirty clothes, puts on a white kurta pajama and then eats a similar small wrapped piece of cake for breakfast. The mystery resolves as we watch the characters in their parallel lives that intersect for a brief moment in a dream-like sequence that plays towards the end of the film.

And the real surprise -- not a single dialogue is spoken in the film. But dialogues are totally unnecessary. We know what the two characters are thinking, we understand their feelings and actions. The silence in Asha Jaoar Majhe is so calming. But with no dialogues, Asha Jaoar Majhe must have been a dream project for sound designer John. The film is packed with ambiance sounds, street noises -- car horns, tram bells, voices of street hawkers, cats meowing and crows cawing, background radio news programmes, Bengali film songs, a woman taking music lessons and early in the morning, school children singing the Indian national anthem. It is like everyday life in India. These background sounds are such a vital part of anybody who had grown up in India. John and Sengupta present the musicality of life in India with such ease that it practically becomes another character in the film. At times, words are spoken, such as when the man goes out to buy fish from a local market. We see his lips moving, body gestures, but we do not hear any sounds. We are in a very real world and yet not hearing voices does not seem strange. It is a quiet meditative. The camera, handled by Sengupta and Mahendra Shetty, often pans through the house, exploring ordinary household objects -- clothes hanging, kitchen utensils, cooked lunch and dinner in fridge, a household cat who slinks around the wooden four poster bed, table cloth with crochet work and lace curtains flapping, as the ceiling fan is run on a high speed. The film ends with a beautiful shehnai piece that we also hear at the start of the film. The choice of the music makes all the sense as the film ends.