Three of Us Review | Avinash Arun’s Film Is a Gentle Mix of Melancholy and Warmth

I would say the beauty of Avinash Arun Dhaware’s Three of Us lies in how it injects a sense of hope into the inherent melancholy of its characters. Even in those moments where the insecurity of some of the characters places the movie in a grey relationship drama sort of space, the aim is not to make it a broken love story. Instead, it gives us a sense of their pain and regret with minimal yet beautifully staged scenes that take you closer to those characters.

The film is primarily about a woman named Shailaja who lives in Mumbai with her husband Dipankar, and the couple has a son, Bharat. Shailaja recently got diagnosed with dementia, and the family is trying to cope with that reality. One fine evening, Shailaja expressed her wish to visit Vengurla, a town she lived in for a few years of her childhood. The visit of the couple to that town and how meeting people from those days comforts Shailaja is what we see in Three of Us.

It is not necessarily your conventional feel-good package. But there is definitely a layer of such warmth in the storytelling of this movie. The partners of Shailaja and Pradip (The childhood friend of Shaliaja who accompanies the couple on their Vengurla journey) have that moment of insecurity when they realize the palpable fondness Shailaja and Pradip have for each other. But instead of making that a driving force for the story to move forward, those tracks deal with the maturity of people embracing that pure love. Pradip’s wife thanks Shailaja for sort of reigniting the laureate in her husband. In Shailaja’s case, Dipankar gets to realize and accept how people evolve in a relationship.

Written and directed by Avinash Arun, Three of Us is ultimately driven by pain. In a way, we see the characters as the debris of a big event that changed the life of Shailaja. Avinash uses the closure journey of Shailaja to get to the character of Pradip, who also went through a similar trajectory. The stillness of the frames gives you a breathing space to understand the characters’ silences. The most winning scene of the movie, for me and probably for everyone, was the giant wheel one. From staging and performance to how the graph of the emotions change in that sequence, it is almost like a short summary of what the movie is about and the scene itself has a cathartic quality.

As Shailaja, Shefali Shah manages to give the character a childlike innocence that never enters the gimmicky zone. The character is so much about how Shailaja looks at people, her body language, and the slow transitions of emotions. One of the memorable moments of the movie was that dancing sequence where she moves aside after forgetting the step, and even in a wide shot, one can sense the angst in those teary eyes. Jaideep Ahlawat, as Pradip Kamat, is given a character that he has never really played in his career. I was in awe of the subtlety with which he played the vulnerable side of Pradip. You just feel like asking filmmakers to cast him in a sweet and simple love story. Prominent lyricist Swanand Kirkire played the part of Shailaja’s husband Dipankar beautifully, and so was the performance of Kadambari Kadam as Sarika.

Somewhere the texture of the movie reminded me of the Malayalam film Meghamalhar, which also had similar ingredients but added in a very different way. Three of Us successfully etches out some beautiful characters, and there are some really memorable conversational bits in this movie that are somewhat cheerful even though it has the backdrop of a lingering sadness. If you enjoy gentle and less spoon-fed character exploration, Three of Us is the movie for you.