‘Asha Jaoar Majhe’ has an uncanny beauty to it, in the small details of everyday life. There are no dialogues by the lead actors who have excelled in their portrayal of the characters through the eyes. Emoting without dialogues is certainly one of the hardest things an actor might have to face.
In the lap of chaos amidst a shady lane, two souls reside, they are never named throughout the whole movie. They work at different times of the day and hardly get time to talk to each other. The monotony that prevails in their everyday lives is so well captured by cinematographer Mahendra J. Shetty and the director, Aditya Vikram Sengupta himself. Be it the shots of the water drying up in the frying pan, or the fan that is way too noisy, the sense of loneliness and monotony has crawled into their lives, somehow.
What keeps these two people connected throughout, are dried footsteps of water on a red concrete, house keys kept on the edge of a windowpane, the switch of the noisy fan, admitting coins inside a piggy bank, a piece of cloth, and a lunch. There are two places in the film where the character of Ritwick Chakraborty glimpses Basabdatta Chaterjee’s face on the mirror and through a machine of the factory he works in, a reminder of the longing he has, of seeing his wife.
They hardly get to see each other because when one is at home the latter is working and vice versa, so when they meet it feels so surreal that they are not even aware of their surroundings anymore. Tranquility shows up in their lives, after all the noises they are accustomed to in hubbubs of workplaces and slogan chants on the road, it almost feels like these are the moments they live in or rather live for, even if it lasts for a few moments.
The moment where they see each other after quite some time could have been simple but instead, director Aditya Vikram Sengupta uses a dream-like sequence, imparting surrealism to it, the two characters are so busy that they see each other in dreams or maybe when they see each other, it all feels like a dream. This infuses so much beauty into the whole film.
Text by: Sreyoshi Sil, IBTN9
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