Arjunn Dutt’s marital drama about a man who cheats on his wife on their wedding anniversary-I kid you not-has many flaws. Its basic premise, that a man must be forgiven for one adulterous slip-up even if it happens on his wedding anniversary, if he is otherwise a good husband and father, is embarrassingly flawed.
It is the same logic that counsels rape survivors to marry the rapist. Feathers, you know, must not be ruffled if a marriage is seeming to be on the right track. Why derail it when there are so many other larger issues to deal with, like bringing up a growing son who loves Mama and Dadda even if they are not together anymore.
But the plucky wife Mili (Tanusree Chakraborty) chooses to not forgive; she breaks the marriage although her husband pleads the hanky-panky was a drunken one-off thing and promises he won’t do it again. Even their lawyer friend Mallika wants to know what’s the big deal.
Strangely, the husband Swarnava (Abir Chatterjee) marries and starts a family with the woman Ronja (Anuradha Mukherjee) who caught him offguard and drunk on his wedding anniversary. Did they have a history before the incident? There is no indication of any romantic or hormonal attachment between Swarnava and Ronja before that terribly timed tryst in the bush.
The adulterous set-up reminded me of Esmayeel Shroff’s Hindi film Thodisi Bewafaai where the wife walks out on her seemingly unfaithful husband as he warns, “One day you will return.”
Some such churning seems to be happening to Mili towards the end of Deep Fridge. She gazes longingly at her shirtless husband Swarnava after he stays over for the night to look after their feverish son: yes, she definitely misses the sex.
Is she sorry she didn’t let Swarnava’s one slip-up slide (Thodisi Bewafaai, you know), although she has a seemingly perfect very cool boyfriend Arif (who I suspect is ‘Arif’ for the sake of inclusiveness).
The screenplay is divided into three parts entitled ‘Ice Cube’, ‘Melting Pot’ and ‘Defrost’. All three segments are related to Mili’s refrigerator which is acting up, just like her marriage.
For all its flaws, there is a stirring evocative feeling to the marital drama. In the way the past and the present are mingled, in the way the marriage seems to crumble noiselessly, in the way incidental characters like Mitali (Debjani Chatterjee with her diabetes and sandwiches) drop in unannounced to create an indefinable ripple, in the way the rain pelts and melts into the wistful mood of loss and acceptance… Deep Fridge thaws us out of our misgivings.
And then there are the actors. Of course, Abir Chatterjee who has shaped into one of the most articulate actors of Bengali cinema. Tanusree Chakraborty is adequate but lacks the wherewithal to take the marital crisis beyond the surface. The supporting cast is saddled with characters that range from the unexplored to the stereotypical.