Deep Fridge - When ‘Happy Marriage’ Is A Misnomer

Schisms in marriage are no novelty in Indian cinema, be it Bollywood or regional cinema. We have sterling examples like Mahesh Bhatt’s Arth, Basu Bhattacharya’s Anubhav, Tapan Sinha’s Jotugriha and many others.

What sets Deep Fridge apart and perhaps led it to winning the National Award for the Best Bengali film is that it is ‘different’ from the rest.

Understandable, because there is a huge time-leap between those earlier films and Deep Fridge though the premise on which the narrative is built is the same. It is also subtle, low-key and handled with great restraint both by the young director Arjun Dutta and his main actors Abir Chatterjee and Tanya Chakraborty.

The time-frame of the film refers to the present where the equations within a marriage are too fragile to bear with a one-night stand of the husband with Ronja, (Anuradha Mukherjee) a young girl who has been eyeing him for a long time. Surprisingly, the wife Mili (Tanya Chakraborty) just sees them kissing each other passionately on the night of the party and not in bed.

The irony of the situation is that it is on the night when they are celebrating their wedding anniversary with a merry-making drinking party in the spacious garden of the couple’s spacious home and the husband Swarnavo (Abir Chatterjee) and his wife Mili, seem to be passionately in love with each other. While Swarnavo is a professor, his wife holds a high-powered job in a corporate firm.

When asked what triggered the idea of a marital split in his film, Dutta said, “Watching friends and acquaintances drift apart, even after years together, made me wonder how a relationship that once felt unbreakable can become a source of quiet pain, and whether a couple can ever truly find closure after divorce. Those observations, coupled with my own longing to break the silence around marital breakdown, sparked the story of Swarnava and Mili—two people caught in the “vicious, prejudiced idea of a perfectly happy marriage” who must confront their buried feelings and seek a guilt-free future for themselves and their child.”

Marriage, today, is an intimate picnic for a man and a woman and lasts at the most for two years. It would be wrong to define the uncontrollable energy of this short time - the romance of discovering each other's bodies - as love.

As soon as these two years have passed, the test of true love begins and sometimes, love is so weak that it cannot stand on its own in the family life that follows - it needs to be pillared by affection, compassion, responsibility and mutual understanding. It was not the same till a couple of decades back. When there are cracks in these pillars of affection, compassion and responsibility, the picnic is over.

The narrative marks a time-leap of five years following the wedding anniversary party. Swarnavo and Mili are divorced and Swarnavo is already married to Ronja, (Anuradha Mukherjee) the young girl he had the one-night stand with. He begged his wife not to go in for a legal solution as this would never happen again but Mili was adamant.

Ronja, a reputed vocalist, is pregnant with Swarnavo’s child. Swarnavo and Mili have a lovely son, Tatai whose custody remains a gray area but he mainly lives with his mother Mili, who, on her part, is fulfilling her sexual needs through a much younger, besotted Muslim young man who wants to marry her but she is not and keeps him besotted.

The metaphor in the film is the freezer compartment in Mili’s refrigerator in her spacious bungalow which suddenly stops functioning while Swarnavo, who had come to see his son, gets caught in the torrential rains and cannot go back to his new, pregnant wife. He sets about trying to correct the mechanical fault which, we learn, is a regular occurrence. But the technician also gets caught in the rains so…

Is the director trying to point out that marriages today are often marred by the deep freeze it gets into without the partners being aware and one of them has to set it right? Or, is this a sign of some hope at the end of the dark tunnel otherwise called ‘divorce’ that the ice will finally melt and the marriage will return to an even keel? Dutta keeps these puzzling questions hanging in the air and leaves it to the audience to arrive at their own conclusions. He invests the climax with an open closure, thereby bringing an unfinished relationship back to its unfinished state.

Dutta invests the film with a surrealistic end with the small boy away for a couple of days with his father in the latter’s second home while Mili steps into the surreal world of visions of a lot of love with Swarnavo who she still loves deeply. The stellar performances of Abir, Tanya and Anuradha not to forget the little boy Laskhya Bhattacharya have enriched the film. The ambience of a rainy night where shops have downed their shutters, conveyance is difficult to get, intercut with a beautiful song in the backdrop adds a richness to a film on a challenging subject of marital discord.

The beautiful cinematography is dominated by shades of blue with the soundscape forever backgrounded by the sound of rains outside which forces an embarrassed Swarnavo to spend the night with his ex-wife and little son. Mainstream cinema's exploration of changes, subtle and visible, in the institution of marriage, has been more lip-service than a genuine movement to make a political statement on the man-woman relationship sanctioned by religion, or law, or both. This film mends this lacuna.

The technicians, from the scriptwriter to the director, the sound-recordist, the editor, the cinematographer, the production designer, the music director and the lyricist, have a field day exploring avenues of aesthetic creativity and imagination while making a strong social statement on changing social and moral values within the institution of marriage. Gulzar's choice of a remote railway station as the backdrop and its waiting room as the central stage for the flashback in his Izaazat (1987)

This critic reads Deep Freeze as an acidic comment on high-society marriages by the young director. We are introduced to an elitist marriage where an anniversary party is celebrated with expensive whiskys with some of the ladies taking on a cigarette or two, making slantingly erotic jokes and savouring hot kebabs brought directly from the kitchen.

We get to know the little Tatai who wants his parents together all the time but almost always speaks in English and plays with expensive, ‘foreign’ toys and games. We learn that Mili’s total distrust for the institution of marriage springs from her mother’s leaving her father for another man which led to her father dying of heartbreak.

We also learn that an elitist couple’s split does not topple the financial foundations of the family as Mili has inherited the spacious bungalow from her father.

We learn from this film that there is a certain degree of universality in the way that Arjun Dutta took something from the institution of an Indian marriage and either twisted it, or perfected it, or inflated it, broke it and then drew that moment back into a question about the very form of the image of the man-woman relationship within marriage and also, within film.

Good go, Arjun and team and congratulations are in order.