Briefly Reviewed – Avinash Arun’s ‘Three of Us’

Avinash Arun is a gifted filmmaker, but stories — sometimes — have a mind of their own. Three of Us is about a woman (Shailaja, beautifully played by Shefali Shah) who has been diagnosed with dementia. With her husband tagging along, she goes on a trip to the place she grew up, on the Konkan coast. The writers treat this premise less as a what-happens-next story than a series of vignettes, and that’s both a plus and a minus. The “vignettes” approach works when the content inside each vignette is strong, and here, the hit rate is about 50 percent. Three of Us is never less than watchable, but there’s also an “arthouse” tastefulness that curbs its potential. For comparison, watch Avinash Arun’s Killa, which had both taste and energy. The other problem with the “vignettes” approach is that each vignette should feel irreplaceable, and here, you are often left with the feeling that this episode or that one could have easily been replaced by another episode, and we wouldn’t really notice the difference.

What made the movie for me was Jaideep Ahlawat. His character — named Pradeep, Shailaja’s childhood friend and perhaps more back then — is a marvel of writing and acting. His arc is so precise, it’s breathtaking. We get scenes of Pradeep with his wife, with Shailaja, with Shailaja’s husband — and each “vignette” reveals something about him. That’s why I said stories sometimes slip away from us. In setting out to tell Shailaja’s story, Avinash Arun has (IMO) ended up telling Pradeep’s story, revealing more about him. I have seen many good performances in 2023, but NOTHING to top the three-minute scene at a restaurant where Pradeep talks about his father — and by extension, talks about himself and perhaps all of us who are emotional and sensitive and who think a lot about life. The actor is magnificent, his every gesture, his every line reading complemented by superb editing. At one point, when Shailaja says something, we expect an immediate cutaway to her reaction shot, but the camera stays on Pradeep’s angst and the cutaway happens a couple of beats later. This is the great power of art and artists. Something specific becomes something so universal: thanks to Jaideep Ahlawat, Three of Us becomes ‘All of Us’.