Though outwardly filmmaker Ashwin Chowdhary seems to have nothing in common with painter-sculptor Jehangir Jaani they both seem to have hit on the same idea at the same time.

Jehangir Jaani's experimental seven-minute film called Nakalistan (utopia) brings back Zeenat Aman in the role of a fading actress. Every 40-plus actress wishes to do a Sunset Boulevard. Zeenat Aman seems to have got there, in the unexpected company of Vishwas Kulkarni who plays a gay character, and Pretti Jaiin.

Jaiin was in the news for all the wrong reasons last year. But seems to have made peace with her present, if not her past.

The trauma she underwent last year is likely to lend a cutting edge to her role of a prostitute. Says Jaiin. "All three are fringe people, and certainly not part of the ‘in' crowd in Mumbai."

A marginalized trio also forms the crux of Ashiwini Chowdhary's ready-for-release Siskiyan.

The film revolves around the intimate and tension-charged interaction among three characters ...a woman with a traumatic past, Neha Dhupia, her husband Sachin Khedeker and Sonu Sood who plays the man who has done her wrong.

There are no other characters in Chowdhary's and Jaani's film leading to the belief that the end product could appear to be excessively oppressive for the audience used to seeing a plethora of characters swarming the canvas of an average film.

Madhur Bhandarkar's Page 3 had as many as 37 characters all teeming to be noticed. Isn't a three-character film a bit of a risk? "And rightly so," avers Chowdhary who earlier made that lovely film Dhoop about an aging couple's efforts to come to terms with the death of their son at war.

"Hindi cinema needs to grow up. There's no need to clutter the canvas with irrelevant characters."