Three of Us review: A beautiful ode to memory and preservation

Director Avinash Arun's Three of Us is magisterially performed by Shefali Shah, Jaideep Ahlawat and Swanand Kirkire.

In a sequence from Three of Us, Shailaja played by the stunning Shefali Shah, takes a quiet, unanimated stroll down the street that leads to her childhood home. She gawks at old houses, breathes in the pavement and broodingly looks at ruins, wondering if she means anything to them the same way they mean so much to her. Relics become checkpoints, as memory treads upstream in search of the source, of which all life feels like the floating, unremarkable descendent. We are all diseased by nostalgia, by the tendency to believe that the past was always a better place. ‘Because as kids you have big hearts,’ a character explains in the film. The present is birthed by this very past, but who we really are, is also defined by who we stopped being. Three of Us is a meditative travelogue, a poignant little film about memory and all the roads not taken, it comes to eventually represent.

Shefali Shah plays Shailaja, a middle-aged woman diagnosed with early-onset dementia. She has started to forget things, a fact that her husband Dipankar, a lovely Swanand Kirkire, cautiously tempers with warmth and empathy. He sells insurance, a job, he charmingly admits, pushes him to instill fear in people. Shailaja requests that she would like to visit a small Konkan town she lived in for a few years during her schooling days. It’s a site of both unaddressed trauma and unfulfilled love. The two board a train and, quite literally, head into her past as the film’s scenery switches from one sensorial landmark to another, inviting a person on the cusp of losing her contextualizing abilities to capture one last snapshot with that desperate, nothing-left-to-lose clarity. The allure of the geography we witness is thus shaded by the impending sense of erasure. Does beauty even mean anything if it cannot be recalled, drawn through the visceral inaccuracies of the imagination?

Also read: Avinash Arun Dhaware on Three of Us: It was important to reset before Paatal Lok Season 2

Shailaja, it turns out, has also left behind an unfinished love story. Jaideep Ahlawat plays Pradeep, a schoolmate who never left, the man who stands for everything she couldn’t hold onto. When memory begins to slip down the climactic drain of deletion, people we have locked away in the chambers of our heart, maybe reclaim their true meaning. A meaning that only the language of loss can define. Happiness, elation, exhilaration wouldn’t know what to do with them. Unless both become the same thing. Unless the act of losing them again also happens to coincide with finding them one last time. As they were, as who they were always supposed to be.

Directed by Avinash Arun, who also made the similarly eerie Killa, Three of Us is poignant, but also committedly warm, wishful and life-affirming. It sports humour, courts empathy and frugally extrapolates on human insecurities. Love, jealousy, attraction serve as floating ingredients that though present, rarely do more than cuddle an already cushioned sense of flow and social collaboration. Memory gives everything meaning here, from the existence of a local folk tale, to the images that Shailaja and Dipankar upload to the cloud. To preserve a moment, implies courting insecurities about losing it. To love, means to entertain the endless possibilities of falling out of it.

Shefali Shah in Three of Us

The music, the raw, wooded locations of a thick forested Konkan, become allies in complicating a person’s mazy history and an equally unexamined present. The geography isn’t randomized visual memorabilia, but a carefully curated juxtaposition of elements that contradict the vagueness of urban lives. As something worth saving, be it through technological tools or emotional instruments like stories and fables. Which is why the depth of Shailaja’s lost eyes also contradicts the somewhat incurious gaze of her husband. Despite having lived together for decades, they look at the world in despairingly distinct ways. A fact that may have fuelled the engine of their marriage, carried it over bumps but maybe never steered in the direction that either admitted they wanted to go in. Marriage by definition, is a mutually agreed destination.

Three of Us is masterfully directed, scored and shot. It isn’t as smartly worded as Killa, but is magisterially performed by Shah, Ahlawat and Kirkire. Shah is relentlessly brilliant as a woman who carries around this haunted but also crushingly pleased look on her face. In a scene where she returns to the dance floor where she learned Bharatnatyam, Shailaja crumbles on the inside, overwhelmed by joy and grief that makes even the act of bearing witness impossible.

But Three of Us is as much about memory being the fundamental compass of life, as much it is about love being the chosen or given station to launch all journeys from. When she visits her childhood home, an old mother figure tells Shailaja that her old room was split into two, to make space for more people. It metaphorically refers to a present where she has compartmentalized her heart to accommodate that which her life became, and that which it didn’t. This osmosis of emotion, vulnerability and compassion, is merely supporting cinematic evidence that we are all the stories we couldn’t become - as much as we are the story we get to be.