A mysterious threesome in ‘Haraamkhor’ director’s new film

Director Shlok Sharma once met a family comprising a man and his two wives, both of whom were sisters.

“I was eight or nine when I used to play with their son,” Sharma told Scroll.in. “We would see two women but only one man. Their official story was one of the husbands was away, working in the Merchant Navy. As I got older, I became curious about how they lived under the same roof.”

This curiosity drove Sharma to make his third feature, Two Sisters and a Husband, which was premiered at the recently concluded Tribeca Film Festival. The movie follows Rajat (Dinker Sharma) who is living with the siblings Amrita (Manya Grover) and Tara (Avani Rai) in a hill station, where he works as a hotel manager.

Amrita, the younger sister, is feisty – and pregnant. The quiet Tara seeks solace in a therapist Mohsin (Ashutosh Pathak). Meanwhile, Rajat escapes the domestic situation through his work at the hotel, which is owned by the eccentric Bhed Singh (Himanshu Kohli).

The writing of Two Sisters and a Husband began 10 years ago, soon after Sharma had finished shooting his directorial debut Haraamkhor (it was eventually released in 2017). Sharma and co-writer Shilpa Srivastava had moved on to other ideas before returning to the script in 2019.

“While I dove straight into the script and wrote what happens quickly, Shilpa worked on the backstories of the characters,” Sharma said. “I initially began setting the script in contemporary times, but realising I’m not doing justice to the story, I pushed the timeline back to the ’80s and ’90s, from when I knew the family.”

Noting that the story was a “relationship drama”, he added. “I wanted to understand the world from the perspective of one man and his two wives, how each character in that set-up would justify their decisions.”

Sharma recalled that the family he had encountered as a child would move from place to place after a year or two to escape nosy neighbours. “Rajat, Amrita and Tara are like that,” Sharma said. “The film begins when they arrive at this place.”

Over a 26-day schedule starting in October 2020, cinematographer Arjun Mitra shot Two Sisters and a Husband mostly in Nainital. Sharma was less keen on capturing the beauty of the hills than “communicating the coldness that the various characters feel towards each other”.

Mitra, with whom Sharma had previously worked in television commercials, is a first-time feature cinematographer. Like him, most of the cast are fresh faces.

Photographer Avani Rai was picked for Tara because “Avani has seen reality up close, for example, with her photographic work in Kashmir,” Sharma said. “She also has expressive eyes. Tara required someone like that.”

Manya Grover had worked with Sharma on commercials. Ashutosh Pathak was picked for the role of the therapist for “his ability to talk philosophically,” Sharma said. Dinker Sharma, the film’s lead, had previously appeared in Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar and in 83 as Kirti Azad.

Is Sharma drawn to amoral men? Haraamkhor follows a small-town teacher who has an illicit affair with his school student.

“Nothing like that – I’m just drawn to the complexities of human relationships,” Sharma said. “Perhaps my next film could be about a mother and son.”

Anurag Kashyap is credited as one of the film’s co-producers and Pataal Lok creator Sudip Sharma as creative producer. Both of them saw the film and offered to get associated with it.

“Their names bring recognition to the project,” Shlok Sharma said about his self-funded film, which he and his partner Navin Shetty produced through their company Fundamental Pictures. “The challenges of making independent films stay the same – whether we’ll have money to make the film, and if we do, whether we’ll run out mid-shoot. For now, I want to see the journey our films take through festivals. When the time is right to release, I believe we’ll find the correct audience on the correct platform.”