The Financial Times recently carried a piece, lamenting the decline of artistic standards in Indian cinema. This is misleading because Indian culture and entertainment — outside Bollywood — are not just alive but thriving: from the shows on platforms such as Jio, Netflix and Amazon to the vibrancy of Hindustani and Carnatic music all over the country. A telling rejoinder to the FT is from the world of Indian movies itself, a movie that achieves the highest artistic standards which I review below.
Coy and soft in utterance but explosive in impact was Princess Diana’s famous reference to her husband’s infidelity: “there were three of us in this marriage.” Why the director, Avinash Arun, chose that same English phrase — Three of Us — as the title of this absolute jewel of a Hindi movie when such obvious indigenous alternatives — Hum Teen or Hum Teen Saath — were available will remain a mystery.
On the other hand, that commonality provided the jolt of ironic contrast for this viewer to discern one of the movie’s subtler themes. Three of Us tracks four people as two married couples (Shailaja-Dipankar and Pradeep-Sarika), but it is about three relationships: two between the spouses and an across-marriage third — the heart of the movie — between the childhood sweethearts, Shailaja and Pradeep. Whereas
the Charles-Diana-Camilla threesome was tedious and tawdry that all adultery and betrayal are, in Arun’s creation, all three relationships are chaste and fulfilled (mostly), with each sacralising, not undermining, the other. In the age of incels, polyamory, Tinder, and chatbot partners, there seems to be hope for conventional coupling after all.
Slowly succumbing to early-onset dementia, Shailaja yearns to go back to her childhood town of Vengurla, located in the Konkan. This return-Odyssey, with her caring husband in tow, is an attempt to find the ground beneath her feet even as the present and future are slowly slipping away from her: the past not just as refuge from the future but an anchor to perhaps confront it.
So sumptuously complete is the film that it is hard to say whether Avinash Arun is foremost a musician, painter, poet or simply a master-handler of the hardcore movie material of actors, script and narrative.
Every frame — whether capturing the Konkan of the Western Ghats or its palm-fringed, bleached beaches, small- town India or the protagonists on opposite sides of large, Louis Kahn-like light wells — is worthy of the long, even repeat, gaze which modern technology so conveniently facilitates.
The acting with Shefali Shah, playing Shailaja, and Jaideep Ahlawat, playing Pradeep, is hauntingly memorable. In Paatal Lok, Jaideep Ahlawat is a coiled cop, teetering on the verge of violence even as he fights for justice; in Three of Us, he is all gauche and awkward, tender and comforting, struggling to understand and express himself. In Delhi Crime, Shefali Shah is a determined cop out to seek justice for a horrendous crime. In Three of Us, she has to occupy the nether zone of neither being fully there nor being fully out of it either to portray a coherence that is tinged with melancholy but also afflicted by forgetfulness. Having those bulbously expressive eyes doesn’t hurt.
In Three of Us, the acting is forced to be in one register; the lower octave of understatedness and drama-less emotion (Scenes from a Marriage but from a happy one unlike in the Ingmar Bergman rendition). Not just Shefali Shah and Jaideep Ahlawat but the supporting cast has to pull this off too. Portraying jealous rage is easy but it is far more demanding to betray mild possessiveness from the comfort of a happy marriage as Swanand Kirkire and Kadambari Kadam do so well.
But it is sound, reverberating with the weight and beauty of Indian language and music traditions, that may be the meta-protagonist of the film. Even the name, Vengurla, is poignantly evocative, intimating beauty and foreboding. There is a lovely, pan-Indian or rather South-meets-West sensibility to the movie’s sounds. In one scene, the conversation is in the distinctly Marathi-accented Hindi; in another, the Vedic chanting of the Brahmin priests in the town temple is unmistakably Tamilian in diction and inflection.
One of the movie’s two most memorable scenes revolves around music and dance. Shailaja, observing a practice Bharatanatyam session of young students (as in her past), is involuntarily roused into joining it. As T.M. Krishna’s Carnatic composition suffuses the screen, it is as if music has the power to re-fire Shailaja’s muscle and musical memory, holding out hope for her future life. But that hope is quickly dashed as Shailaja retreats behind a pillar, either because she has embarrassed herself in front of more competent youngsters or deluded herself that she can exert some control over her impending fate, foreshadowing the plaintive, “What if I even forget our son?” she will ask of her husband at the end of the film.
As if to counterbalance South with West/North, the Carnatic rendition is soon followed by Kumar Gandharva’s famous Hindustani composition, “Nain ghat ghat thun”, as the three protagonists — husband, wife and her childhood love — drive through Konkan (no less God’s Own Country than Kerala) with different permutations of seating arrangements for the threesome, a comfortably rotating ‘three of us’ as it were.
“For every text, a context”, pronounced Salman Rushdie. So, yes, art cannot escape contemporary reality. But can there occasionally not be some text transcending context, some text with the same power to stir and rouse in 2025 as in 1925? Can there not be some Indian art — movies, TV and fiction — that does not traffic in the standard Indian themes of religious bigotry, foaming nationalism, venal politicians, incompetent governments and, of course, more recently, in the motivated glorification of the past by re-cycling myths and history?
Is Indian art or entertainment not capable of transcending these dark pathologies and instead dealing with the more timeless themes of love and loss, family and friends, death and disease? Or, as the German director, Werner Herzog, once put it to the American comedian, Stephen Colbert, about looking into the Manhattan phone directory and wanting to know of each person: “…do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night?” Three of Us responds to that Herzogian impulse. It is less art as escapism and more the difficult and daring art that can rise above the convenient and contemporary to a certain timelessness.
The climactic scene in Three of Us unfolds between Shailaja and Pradeep on a stranded ferris wheel. A past love is re-visited, re-affirmed, and closed without any descent into illicitness. Fingers don’t seek the comfort of mutual entanglement; no hug or a kiss is even gestured at; even the conversation unfolds not between two people facing each other but as words spoken into the impersonal ether by each with the other more as witness than participant. Self-restraint or perhaps even the lack of need for self-restraint intensifies the raw emotion.
All this is done without violating the sanctity of the two marriages that Pradeep and Shailaja are part of. Indeed, what follows this scene are depictions of the comfortable domesticity of those two marriages. Pradeep gifts his wife a lovingly embroidered cloth he has long been working on as if to say to her, ‘thank you for the space you have afforded me in allowing me to go back to the past.’ In the next scene, Dipankar is administering an affectionate oil-champi (a head message) to Shailaja while in video conversation with their son.
Back then, Prince Charles, still wedded to Diana, was caught confessing to his lover, now wife, Camilla, over the phone: “I want to be your tampon.” From the depths of one bad marriage, that was His Royal Highness’s lofty aspiration of intimacy for the next.
We are all the cursed legatees of Freud and Bergman, doomed to over-psychologising, making at best an uneasy, provisional settlement with the past or where the past remains but as barely manageable residue. Or, as Woody Allen once put it: “My childhood was a fairy tale: Grimm.” But in Three of Us, past trauma is shared and come to terms with. Lives move on, not paralysingly scarred, not unhappily.
Three of Us is a movie where decent people inhabit the world, where relationships are wholesome, where time stands still, where nature is lush and verdant, where sullied modernity does not intrude, where calm and, god forbid, a measure of contentment — even in the face of life’s quotidian and cosmic travails — seem within human reach.
Visually and musically gorgeous, theatrically taut and, above all, tenderly life-affirming, Three of Us needs to be recognised as belonging in the pantheon of great Indian film-making. Think of it as Ingmar Bergman but sparing us the tormented angst or as Satyajit Ray
operating exclusively in the inner, interior registers like an Amir Khan khayal.
Arvind Subramanian is former Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India, and co-author of A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey