Two films with only three characters in them are coming up courtesy filmmaker Ashwin Chowdhary and painter-sculptor Jehangir Jaani, one of them marking the return of Zeenat Aman.

Jaani's experimental film called "Nakalistan" brings back yesteryear star Zeenat in the role of a fading actress.

Every 40-plus actress wishes to do a "Sunset Boulevard". Zeenat seems to have got there in the unexpected company of Vishwas Kulkarni who plays a gay character and Pretti Jaiin, who was in the news for all the wrong reasons last year.

"All three are fringe people and certainly not part of the 'in' crowd in Mumbai," Pretti told.

A marginalised trio also forms the crux of 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 wronged Neha.

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

Madhur Bhandarkar's "Page 3" had as many as 37 characters teeming to be noticed. Isn't a three-character film a bit of a risk?

"And rightly so," says Chowdhary who earlier made that lovely film "Dhoop" about an aging couple's efforts to come to terms with the death of their son in a war. "Hindi cinema needs to grow up. There's no need to clutter the canvas with irrelevant characters."

Other films with three or less characters - Sunil Dutt's "Yaadein" (featured only the director, plus his wife Nargis in a cameo appearance); Basu Bhattacharya's "Aavishkar" (Rajesh Khanna as husband, Sharmila Tagore as wife, their baby and a guest appearance by the heroine's father); Mrinal Sen's "Genesis" (Shabana Azmi, Om Puri and Naseeruddin Shah locked in a bitter battle of wits that culminates in the Jaisalmer deserts).

Yet another movie like that was Moni Bhattacharya's "Faraar" (Amitabh Bachchan as the fugitive locked in policeman Sanjeev Kumar's house with the woman Sharmila Tagore linking the two).