The three protagonist formula seems to be working wonders for Bollywood

Three's no longer a crowd

The three protagonist formula seems to be working wonders for Bollywood, given the recent success of films like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara and Delhi Belly. looks into cinema's rule of 3

Omne trium perfectum — everything is perfect in threes. It's a Latin phrase, probably a thousand years old, but Bollywood has adopted the idea with some success. Dil Chahta Hai (DCH), Farhan Akhtar's ode to friendship, sparked it off in the new millennium. More recently, No Entry, 3 Idiots, Pyaar Ka Punchnama, Delhi Belly, and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (ZNMD) have turned three into a trend. These are all films that have a strong element of humour in them. And they strive to explore the theme of friendship. But why are script writers opting for three protagonists to explore male-bonding or create humour? Is there something inherently funny about the capers of three guys? Zoya Akhtar, the director of ZMND, says it wasn't a conscious decision, "but it works better when it's three." Why three? "Well, for one thing it's not two, and the kind of story I was writing works better with interconnecting storylines. Think about it, you hardly ever go on a trip with one other person." Having three characters to play with gives the writer an opportunity to weave in more storylines. This lends dynamism to the narrative. Take a romantic story. Boy loves girl. There's conflict in the form of misunderstandings, boy and girl overcome these to live happily ever after. Standard Bollywood plot. Put another boy or girl in the mix, and suddenly it's a love triangle. The possibility for drama rises exponentially. This holds true for buddy movies as well. The two hero buddy movie necessarily needs a villain. Two characters can't sustain a narrative based purely on friendship. So whether it be Sholay or Yaraana or even Do Aur Do Paanch, the friendship always gets superceded by the main action narrative of the story. But in the buddy movie, where the friendship narrative holds sway, it's handy to have three protagonists. "The triangle is the most stable configuration for a buddy movie. In Delhi Belly, the two guys (Vir Das and Kunal Roy Kapoor) are the two sides of the triangle and Tashi (Imran Khan) is the base. If you compare it to a musical performance, those two are the solo artists while Imran's character is the solid rhythm section, keeping everything together. If there were only two characters, I wouldn't have the balance, and it wouldn't have given me enough room to go in different directions," says Akshat Verma, the writer of Delhi Belly. This is a structure that can be noticed in other tri-protagonist films as well. Look at DCH. Saif's character is clearly the base, the guy who holds the group together, while Aamir and Akshay Khanna's characters have willful personalities that give the writer the opportunity to weave more interesting story-lines through them. In 3 Idiots, too, there is a similar structural pattern at work. R. Madhavan is the sensible base while Aamir Khan and Sharman Joshi have more free-wheeling story arcs. Three characters also work in a comedic sense. The straight guy, the base, acts as a foil for the two more erratic ones. So the normality of Saif in DCH or an Imran in Delhi Belly highlights the zaniness of the others. As the importance of a good, tight script gains value in Bollywood, writers are coming up with narratives that are fast paced and dynamic. Having more than two main characters enables them to do so. There have been films with more than 3 characters as well. Dhamaal and the Golmaal series have four lead characters. Though these films have worked, it's difficult, given the running time of a movie, to do justice to all the characters in the narrative. If you have three A-list actors as in the case of DCH or ZNMD, it's even more of a problem. So for now, in Bollywood, three seems to be the optimal number.