Confession time: I love Shahana Goswami’s work. For my time and attention, she is one of the most undervalued actors around, her spectrum of performances from Rock On to this new series (well, not quite shiny new but refreshingly untrodden) is worth a slow clap.
Four Years Later, written by Mithila Gupta, Nicole Reddy and S. Shakthidharan demonstrates impressive writing glimpses, enough to keep me watching till the final eight episode, but not enough to not question some of the marital and moral decision taken by the couple.
Why, for example, does the self-willed anti-doormat protagonist Sridevi (Goswami) choose to silently suffer her father-in-law’s bullying when her husband leaves for Sydney for further medical studies soon after their marriage?
We are told from the start she is no walkover and she knows she is getting into a marriage of mismatches.
Early in the storytelling she orders herself two scoops of different flavours of ice cream (Mango and Chocolate, I think) while her future husband orders “one small scoop of vanilla”.
“This,” says Sridevi with a roll of her expressive eyes, “says everything about you.”
It also says everything about the series which in the subsequent episodes leans into the arid marriage between two distant individuals, ruffles some feathers, but largely lets the couple sort out its own differences.
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Trouble begins when Sridevi joins her husband Yash (Akshay Ajit Singh) in Sydney. Four years have passed (ref: the title) since they married and he left, and the couple needs to build its marital relationship from the scratch. Their hesitant attempts to reach out to one another are initially sensitively mapped. But there is too much feminist baggage accompanying Sridevi to Sydney.
If he can do it, why can’t I? is not the best way to get a stalled marriage restarted. I don’t know of any Indian husband in the world who can be okay with his wife indulging herself in a raw carnal one-night stand while he is away. An affair, out of loneliness, is perhaps excusable, even understandable. But the way co-directors Mohini Herse and Fadia Abboud have shot Sridevi’s night of stolen pleasure exempts the tryst from all decency, and excuses.
To Yash’s credit he takes even his wife’s one-night-stand (he doesn’t know how wild it was, we do) in his stride. But the problems keep… errr, mounting. There is a sense of uneasy doom at the heart of this stalled marriage. Shahana’s Sridevi is often caught ruminating by the sea, sometimes plunging into the water with nothing on except the eclectic background music.
She is not the perfect wife. She was never meant to be. Perhaps the couple’s fractured moral compass is a mirror of modern marital alliances, especially those that are meant to grow on foreign soil.
Four Years Later looks at the NRI marriage more through the eyes of the distant observer rather than an insider.
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