The film, however, suffers from a scattered language. Jain, who, started off her career as a video editor for video news magazines, has a keen sense of rhythm and shock, placing disparate visuals next to each other which can feel discordant, like when the film is cruising between the fields where jute is stacked, the factories where it is processed, the children of these jute factory workers, and the younger workers who are fermenting dreams of working elsewhere. In these cuts, there is a sense that the film is trying to be larger than its shape, to express the story of jute, but also the people who clump around jute, defined by it, affected by its growth, and demise — to give equal attention to the material and the material lives of those attached.
This ambitiousness bloats the film, unsteadying the emotional momentum of its human story, of mill workers caught in a fading world. This is captured in the voice-overs and interviews. But it is expressed, best, in the images — of men sleeping beside slurring machines, its sound like a lullaby, of namaz being performed silently, Hanuman stickers on machines, and images of Vishwakarma, the deity of the craftspeople, of sweat on bare bodies, and the casual crumpling of gutka in the hands of a worker who is looking ambivalently as a speech is given, insisting on labour dignity and higher wages — a life lived in the cracks and crevices between speeches and performances, slurped up by the quietly greedy camera.