Login to TheReviewMonk

Labour of Love

Labour of Love Poster

Critic Rating

7.7

8 Reviews
3 Ratings
100%
in favor

Audience Rating

8.0
1 Review
2 Ratings

Movie Info

Language

Bengali

Synopsis

Set in the crumbling environs of Calcutta, Labour of Love(Asha Jaoar Majhe) is a lyrical unfolding of two ordinary lives suspended in the duress of a spiralling recession.

Labour of Love Reviews

IE Reviewer
Indian Express

-

The international accolades it is winning across festivals are well deserved. Please do watch the film to enjoy the beauty of silence in a world gone chaotic with cacophony.

10

It is a must watch film, a once in the lifetime kind of work that should be supported by film lovers and experienced on the big screen.

Reviewer Profile
Times Of India

7

...it's surely a film you shouldn't miss. It will remind you how actions can speak louder than words.

-

From the storytelling point of view, the end of Labour of Love is a frustrating and critical misstep because it takes a gorgeously promising film and turns it into a disappointment. Still, despite this, Labour of Love is memorable, mostly for its sensitive cinematography, but also because Sengupta was brave to trust his camera, actors and soundscape to tell a story. Labour of Love is quintessentially arty, but this time around, it’s not a bad thing.

Tanaya Ramyani
BookMyShow

-

How patient are you when it comes to films? This isn’t a fast-paced honey-dipped story of love where the couple sings or dances. Everything about Labour of Love is artsy. If you love watching parallel cinema, Labour of Love has the right elements. Also, get a big tub of popcorn for this one.

Uday Bhatia
LiveMint

-

Labour Of Love is one of the most visually and aurally striking films in recent years, but you have to wonder whether there’s enough going on within scenes to justify all that it chooses to leave out. The film makes it clear that there’s a recession going on, but we don’t know how this is affecting our couple—whether they’re both working because they have to pay the bills, or if that’s the way they prefer it.

6

...Sengupta fashions a lovely tale of love in times of recession. It’s about routinised work lives, the loneliness of living in shifts in your own homes, of being a family, yet not knowing the pleasures of eating and living together. But hope lives.

Reviewer Profile
The Hindu

-

Through cross cuts, the cyclical nature of the narrative expresses itself. You don’t really need to be physically present to express your love. Here it come through the washing and cooking that one does for the other and in between both of them yearn for that meeting that happens at the end of the day. Or is it at the start of the new one! Sengupta has given those moments a dreamy treatment but even in that reverie the couple doesn’t lose touch with the ground. Have the pressures of job turned them mechanical in their romance? Oh! Not quite. It is as tender as the first kiss. Go check!

Audience Reviews for Labour of Love

  • Shashwat Sisodia
    Shashwat Sisodia
    300 reviews
    Top Reviewer
    9

    Aditya Vikram Sengupta's 'Asha Jaoar Majhe' is a little Bengali wordless film about two people, 'The Man' and 'The Woman'. They are husband and wife, living in what seems to be an ancestral home. Woman works in a Jute bag factory during the daytime. It is when the man is home. He buys fish, and cooks. He takes a bathe. He sleeps. He dreams. When the woman is back, man has gone. He works in a printing press in night shifts. She eats, washes her face. Actually, this film is their daily lives. But these activities are textured and emoted with a satisfactory emptiness. And their is a blooming romance between the couple, as it meets when the man comes home and the woman has to get ready for her work at the same time. Its when their love story genuinely moves you. At that, the film is extremely well-written and well-acted: the performances by Basabadatta Chatterjee and Ritwick Chakraborty well-render some tunes into the odd silence they share.

    October 14, 19