Labour of Love

A woman leaves home on her way to work. Her husband has just arrived home and gets ready to go to bed. The day unfolds in cross-cut shots: she works, he sleeps. Half way through, they switch roles. The importance of their work becomes clear from minor topical asides: in today’s Calcutta, the crisis is causing mass unemployment.
Only at the end of the day (or the beginning of the next) does the couple come together. In his debut film, Aditya Vikram Sengupta meticulously builds up to the meeting in his cyclical work, the painterly images in which would be just as at home on the walls of a gallery as in a cinema. He focuses on details in the dilapidated locations and on the small, everyday actions with which the couple maintain contact despite their physical distance: the washes they do for each other, the meals they prepare for each other. A work of love.