Labour of Love

The movie is pretty brilliantly directed, the first half of the movie actually sets the stage for the second half. It highlights the life of a common man in the suburbs of Kolkata, though the movie doesn't have any dialogues but it speaks thousands of words. Both the male and the female protagonist act exemplarily well.

Awesome Camera work with marvelous background score..uff that sehnai!

The movie tests your patience a lot, and at times you wonder whether anything is going to happen at all, and perhaps that is the exact reaction the director wants to evoke from his audience. The pacing is slow, there are no dialogues , the story is told through background noise and unbelievably accurate shots of two people doing monotonous household chores. The camera-work is intriguing, unusual and beautiful in general- the camera often zooms in and lingers for a while on seemingly mundane things that are generally not highlighted on the big screen - soap bubbles in a bucket, a rooftop antenna , the clothesline .. And all this obsession with detail, the slow pacing , the impassive faces suddenly make sense in the last 5 minutes. The entire movie is a buildup for the ending, which is beautiful . It makes you want to watch the movie all over again.

Many of us, specifically people of Bengal residing out of Bengal , are in a habit of crying out loud most of the time saying "Ei Bangalir dwara ar kissu hobe na [ Nothing good ll happen by these Bongs ]". But then something like this happens and you start wondering - would it be possible by any other person apart from a Bengali !? I have my doubts.

"Labour of love" or "Asha Jawar Majhe" - it is nowhere close to the very idea of film that we usually have in our mind. The 84 min journey is mundane,monotonous,banal in all its senses - but then you ll realize it is just depicting a single day of our very own life which itself is of the same nature.

This film has only two characters and none of them has a single dialogue. Because conversation is not mandatory to capture neither the repetitiveness of our daily chores nor those few special moments [ a window - one can say here ] for which we gather the energy to complete our hackneyed routine.

The level of detail of this film - I could not recall a single colored Bengali film which have the same. When the camera unusually zooms in and lingers over the seemingly insignificant things - the cracked wall, the sunset, the clothesline, the revolving cycle - it surely test viewer's patience but also tells a story - a story where everyone of us is fighting our daily battle to survive ; Sorry , not "to survive" , but "to love". The whole slow-pace was just an intriguingly exquisite build-up for the last 5 poetic min, where we comes to realize that - yes, to cherish just a few moments of love, we are being able to continue our vapid journey; we are ready to be a "Labour of Love".

Aditya Vikram Sengupta - What have you created!!!!

NOTE: Not in a mood to go into the insipid details of direction,camera,cinematography,sound or acting cause if all these have not been perfect, THIS experience wouldn't have been created at the very first place.

'Asha jaoar majhe' (Labour of love) was not only a mesmerizing cinematic experience, it was like watching a poetry written by a camera. This film just put a whole new dimension of Bengali art-house cinema. A eighty-minute film without any words didn't surprise me, what surprised me was that I merely felt its absence. Director Aditya Bikram Sengupta's this celluloid sculpture has shown that visual storytelling is not only just a modulating factor, it can stand on its own. This film also pointed out that to depict that level of detailing you have to be honest with your story. Talking about acting, their (Basabdatta and Ritwik) hardest job was to not "act". That's why the whole movie was like I was following and observing two people. Though the film was about disappointment and despair of daily life, it also gave us a optimistic perspective at the end.