Four friends are sitting around the dinner table. Two of them are married to each other, while the other two are set to get married soon. The topic of discussion: open marriages vs infidelity.
As video plugs for books go, it is a nifty idea. The short film The Dinner, directed by Neeraj Udhwani, has been made by Humara Films and Penguin Random House India to promote Ravinder Singh’s latest examination of relationships, titled This Love That Feels Right… The film features an eight-minute debate on what it means to be married. One of the characters who has read Singh’s novel describes (while a TV interview of Singh plays helpfully in the background) the plot being about “a woman finding love outside marriage”.
One view is that marriage is a commitment that requires you to find satisfaction within the union, while another view is that a marriage should be democratic and liberating instead of being an obligation. The engaged woman is taken aback when she realises that her fiancé see the traditional institution as suffocating, while the married man seems upset by his wife’s favourable position on open marriages. Is it alright to tell your spouse about wanting sexual satisfaction outside the marriage? Is monogamy the only way to fulfill marital vows? The Dinner poses a question that many couples might want to discuss and get out of the way before taking the leap. Although the video is an advertisement for a book, the message that those on opposite sides of the debate are unlikely to find happiness with each other comes through strongly.