Nishaanchi Movie Review: Welcome back, Anurag Kashyap

Nishaanchi Movie Review:

Under a faint, neon-pink light, a guy and a girl sit close, facing each other. A kiss is incoming. As they lean in, the boy, like a reptile, sticks his tongue out. “What is this?” the girl asks. “Kissing?” replies the guy. “You must have done it quite a bit,” she says. “No, I have watched.” “Where?” she asks. “Raja Hindustani.”

Directed by: Anurag Kashyap

Written by: Prasoon Mishra, Ranjan Chandel and Anurag Kashyap

Starring: Aaishvary Thackeray, Vedika Pinto, Monika Panwar, Kumud Mishra and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub

Anurag Kashyap returns in full-throttle, filmy firepower with Nishaanchi. The filmmaker, who in recent years has been dabbling with everything ranging from science-fiction to romantic-drama, finally gets to play on his homeground of Hindi heartland crime-comedy. Since Kashyap’s magnum opus Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), the genre has had an unpruned growth on OTT (Mirzapur, Rangbaaz, Apharan). With his latest, the director still manages to find something fresh, something alluring, something charming. He flips and breathes life into done-to-death scenes, proving that when the master speaks, you listen.

After a bank robbery goes wrong, Babloo Nishaanchi (Aaishvary Thackeray) is behind bars. His tweedy, twin brother Dabloo and firecracker girlfriend Rinku had somehow managed to escape from the scene of the crime. The story’s villain is Ambika chacha (Kumud Mishra), a local muscleman, who is trying to get Rinku’s ancestral house and is also harassing Babloo and Dabloo’s mother Manjri (Monika Panwar). The manipulative Ambika and the Nishaanchi family have a history. The story jumps to a flashback where we meet Manjri and her husband Jabardast (Viineet Kumar Siingh in an exemplary performance), an akhada wrestler and more of a raging bull whose muleta is flicked by a young Ambika in whichever direction he pleases. Manjri can see through his schemes as he leers at her. After Jabardast is murdered inside the jail, young Babloo, looks up to Ambika as a father figure. He even kills for him. But things get complicated once love gets in the picture. In a scene, Babloo asks Ambika, “Now, you decide, you want a Mughal-E-Azam or a Hum Aapke Hain Koun?”

Kashyap’s film references are not just for garnish. They sing in every scene. Babloo isn’t a movie buff because he is an Anurag Kashyap character. His formative years were spent in a juvenile correction centre, where films playing on a TV screen was his only window to the outside world. Once out, he even renames himself Tony Mantena, after Al Pacino’s iconic character from Scarface (1983). Nishaanchi revels in such flimsy fun, adorned by flowery Hindustani. Kashyap flexes his dialogue prowess, effectively capturing the Kanpur colloquial and we get lines like “dhamkane aaya tha, chamka diye (He came to warn, I left him lovelorn) or “aapko dekh kar humara hormone harmonium bajata hain din, pratidin (After seeing you my hormones play like a harmonium, all day, every day).” The music by Anurag Saikia, Manan Bhardwaj, Aaishvary Thackeray and Dhruv Ghanekar blends itself well with the eastern UP flavour. I personally enjoyed ‘Fillam Dekho’, ‘Pigeon Kabootar’ and ‘Kanpuriya Kantaap’.

Aaishvary Thackeray is a find. As big brother Babloo, the actor has an eclectic, electric presence and while portraying the younger Dabloo, he knows how to tame himself, just flowing under the surface. Vedika Pinto fits well as the fiery Rinku and so does Kumud Mishra and Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, but the show-stealer is Monika Panwar. She exhibits a silent resilience as the strong mother Manjri, commanding the screen in every scene. An arresting performance.

Kashyap, however, can’t escape the ghost of Gangs… A family history, a killing of a father, the spirit of the gangster film looms over Nishaanchi. Ardent fans of the franchise can spot similar locations and dialogue hat-tips (‘Lakshan thik nahi lag rahe tumhare (I am not liking your traits)’ As the filmmaker frequently mentioned in his pre-release interviews, the movie is indeed his answer to those seeking Gangs of Wasseypur 3. At a run-time inching towards three hours, Nishaanchi has the aspirations of being an epic, but it doesn’t have the narrative firepower. While Gangs… interspersed the history of a country with that of a family, Nishaanchi is rather simple and preferably should have been more contained. It gets bloated at intervals, meandering to find its core, unable to decide if it’s a love story, a brother-on-brother rivalry or a revenge-saga.

Still, the film has enough going for it to make it an amusing watch. It works like an Elmore Leonard novel set in North India whose plot thins out by the end. It works better if you look at it as just a base for a sequel. Hopefully the second part is more propulsive. Better strap-up, kahaani abhi baaki hain (“To Be Continued…”)