“Dusk' is a beautifully executed contemplative work about the life of a young Nepalese prostitute from Sonagachi, an area renowned to be Asia's largest red-light district and home to around 7,000 sex workers living and working in multi-storied buildings along the roads of North Kolkata. In reality, it is more a tiny slice-of-life of the aforementioned sex worker as it catches only an ephemeral moment of happiness and evasion from her often unsavoury life-routine.
“Dusk” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative
A client (Manoj Kar) who looks very at ease and probably a regular of the house, visits the girl (Pansy Brahma) and spends with her few calm moments; they chat, he paints her toenails, the lay side by side, they look more like lovers than client/provider. The day is almost over and she asks to be taken on a scooter ride. On the bank of the river, they watch the sun going down and after a cigarette, they head back.
Not much happens in this short film, written and directed by Ujjal Paul, but it encapsulates with grace this brief moment of simple pleasure, a taste of an unhurried life the girl can only dream of. A good example of slow-cinema, “Dusk” gets even slower with the frequent use (maybe a bit too frequent) of slow-motion, so much so that in a couple of parts you wonder if you pressed the pause button by mistake.
Visually very impressive, “Dusk” is bathed in a green/yellow light punctuated by bright red details and the care in composing and framing the shots is extreme. The sound design is also remarkable and gives lots of character to the whole. The sounds and noises of the busy urban setting are neatly layered and controlled to render the feeling of the chaotic surrounding but without losing all the details relevant for the storytelling.
“Dusk” is all so pleasant to the eye, idyllic and charmingly composed that makes us forget that the girl is a sex worker in one of the worst places on earth, where HIV and STD thrive, where ¾ of the clients refuse to use condoms, where available on sale there are girls as young as 7 years old and where girls are often beaten and trapped. Surely the aim of the author was to depict a transient moment of peace in which the protagonist forgets about her life, but I wonder if, on our side, as an act of love for the protagonist, we shouldn't be allow to forget, even for just a moment, that her life is pure hell.
Nice vedio
Well come