On demand: "Labour of Love/Asha Jaoar Majhe"

The question posed by 2014's mesmerising indie Labour of Love/Asha Jaoar Majhe - and it's one which isn't answered until quite late on in proceedings - is what kind of love story the writer/director Aditya Vikram Sengupta is telling. Initially, we're watching two silent Calcutta residents go about their daily business. A woman in a resplendent sari (Basabdatta Chatterjee) takes a tram and then a bus across town to start work in her factory job, packing designer handbags; meanwhile, a somewhat indolent-seeming man (Ritwick Chakraborty) relaxes into his apparently abundant spare time. (No sooner has he got up than it's time for another nap.) The camera, for its part, keeps having its head turned by the faded beauty of recession-hit 21st century Calcutta: the rattling public transport, the paint-chipped, soot-blackened buildings, the messy life of the city's marketplaces, here set against the shirts drying pristinely on its washing lines and the slate-grey, smogged-over skies. What's entering the film's ears, in the absence of any conventional dialogue, is pure sound design: those trams, the birds, the swelling marches protesting the high cost of living, the bells on the necks of the livestock that still have occasion to be shepherded through these streets.

Sengupta has almost certainly been studying the slow cinema: his eye habitually scans these frames for anything that might be of interest, or spark visual pleasure. A striking staircase; a cat lazing in the mid-afternoon heat; an especially roseate sun going down. Evening brings with it constellations of streetlights and power lines. Time seems to pause altogether, maybe even goes into reverse in places. Is this the Calcutta of 2014, or the Calcutta of Ray's day, or something less concrete than conceptual: some eternal Calcutta? One thing's for sure: this is the work of a director keen to pump the brakes on the frantic accelerationism of today's India in favour of drinking it all in, possibly while getting a little drunk on his own intoxicating imagery. A subsequent film of Sengupta's, 2021's Once Upon a Time in Calcutta, staggered around with a murderously bad head, but here, at least, the filmmaker remained clear-eyed in what he could achieve with all this craft: an idea of the rhythms of the working day, some feel for the mysteries of the city, those areas that remain off-limits to more narrative features, and a broader compendium of gestures that speak multitudes. (The most gorgeous of these are food-related: one character refills spice jars and the screen simultaneously, while a meal is prepared in the kind of ravishing close-ups typically deployed in adland.) This is, finally, a labour of love - small tasks carried out with immense care, and in such a way as to mean so much - but it's also a transportation, a great modern city symphony, and one of those films that defies movie physics: it runs 81 minutes, but generates a near-complete, immaculately balanced and weighted picture of what it is to live, work and indeed love in this particular metropolis.

Labour of Love is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.