Triple Seat (2019) opens with renowned lawyer Jehangir Irani (Rakesh Bedi) being interviewed on stage. The interviewer asks him about which cases he won but wishes that he had lost, and Irani immediately becomes wistful and spins a tale of the time when three men broke into his house late at night to ask for legal advice. Krushna (Ankush Chaudhari) starts telling his story, which means that after only a few minutes we're already two flashbacks in.
Krushna is a good guy who works hard to support his family. He drives a van that operates as a sort of bus service for the neighborhood, and business is good. Krushna can be a bit naive, but once he gives his word on something he absolutely will not back down, so when he receives a desperate phone call from a young woman who claims to have been kidnapped asking that he buy some minutes for her cell phone so that she can call her family, he's happy to help.
Krushna doesn't just pay for minutes, though. He goes straight to the police station and reports the kidnapping. Inspector Bahurao (Pravin Tarde) is suspicious, and he's proven right almost immediately when the girl, calling herself Meera (Shivani Surve), calls to thank Krushna; it turns out the kidnapping was all just a college prank.
Against all odds, Krushna and Meera become "missed call friends," basically pen pals but with phone calls instead of letters. They agree to never meet, but tell each other about their lives. Meera talks about her abusive and controlling father (Vaibhav Mangale), while Krushna shares his struggles with his own widowed and alcoholic father (Vidyadhar Joshi.)
Eventually there is good news! Krushna's family have found a match for his younger sister (Shilpa Thakre), and the families got along so well that everyone agreed to a double wedding, with Krushna marrying the groom's beautiful sister Vrunda (Pallavi Patil). Krushna invites Meera to the wedding ceremony, but Meera reminds him that they were never supposed to meet, and jokes that if she comes Krushna will end up marrying her instead. Unfortunately her father overhears that part of the conversation, hits her, breaks her phone, and threatens to marry her off in two days.
Krushna's engagement ceremony starts well, but then Inspector Bahurao shows up to arrest him for kidnapping a girl named Tanvi; Krushna is the last person to have called her, he's been calling her for ages, and it quickly becomes clear that "Meera" has been Tanvi all along. Her parents beg him to release their daughter, but when she arrives at the police station, there's a whole lot of shouting.
Bahurao solves the problem as best he can: he's adopting Tanvi, effective immediately, her father isn't allowed to hit anyone, and because he assumes that Tanvi and Krushna are in love, he insists that they get married right away and won't listen to any arguments otherwise.
So Krushna is married to the wrong woman, his sister's marriage is off, and his entire family blames Tanvi. The new couple take different paths to figure out what to do. Krushna and his friends break into the home of respected lawyer Jehangir Irani, closing one of the flashbacks, and Irani suggests a mutually agreed no fault divorce. They'll have to wait six months, they can't tell anyone until the divorce goes through, and he needs to marry Vrunda immediately afterwards.
Tanvi talks to her mother, who tells her that marriages are made in heaven and she needs to make this marriage work, adding that the only way to do that is with the power of unconditional love. Tanvi is in a classic Bollywood romance situation,living in her beloved's house under false pretenses,and tasked with winning his family over, though with the added difficulty that she needs to win her beloved over as well. So she Shah Rukhs the heck out of things, making everybody's lives better even if that means giving Krushna his divorce. Krushna starts to waver, but he took a vow, and he will fulfill it and marry Vrunda and get his sister married as well, even though both matches were arranged and nobody else is that hung up on it.
This is romance as puzzle, an "unsolved case,"as Irani puts it. They may try to build a little suspense, but there's no question of what the end will be, so you watch to find out how they get there. And on those terms, it's a pleasant little mystery.
