A purposely reckless, three-hour ride through Kanpur’s past, Nishaanchi is Anurag Kashyap at his most playful and indulgent, but it lacks the searing intensity that powered his films like Gangs of Wasseypur
The proposition of watching a three-hour-long Anurag Kashyap film makes you want to brace yourself, for all kinds of reasons. It’s the work of a filmmaker who has sought creative freedom all his career and has only recently, and supposedly, untethered himself from the clutches of Bollywood.
It’s the work of a filmmaker who has been unfairly snubbed more than once by an implicit order that hasn’t allowed even a Cannes-worthy film like Kennedy to see the light of day. It’s also the work of a free spirit that just wants to be its own, seemingly unbothered by the consequences that most others of its ilk self-impose. Nishaanchi is that one movie carrying many burdens at once, yet also coming across as distinctively liberated from the obligations just mentioned.
Even if the title cards didn’t carry the information, there would have been little to no doubt that Nishaanchi is an Anurag Kashyap film. Its narrative is as carefully reckless as its chief protagonist, Babloo (Aaishvary Thackeray), aka Tony ‘Mantena’. Its setting of Kanpur of the late 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s is as giving and untiring as Wasseypur is. Its love is always at tragedy’s peril, and its violence is comical and customary at the same time.
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Heck, Vineet Kumar Singh is once again made to be an overlooked, criminally out-of-luck athlete (a pehelwan or wrestler this time around) whose fate jerks him around until he loses his mind. It isn’t that Kashyap is recycling his tropes and tones because of laziness. It’s more about him wanting to do something about the residues of a particular world. And that’s the concern with Nishaanchi: its inability to shake off its past and its now-overfamiliar tricks seems always at odds with an ambition to stay in the present and have fun at all costs.
Refreshing in parts
Past, indeed, is the operative word because the film is set a couple of decades ago, but its ethos is of Hindi cinema’s glorious past of the 1960s and ‘70s. Kashyap would have done Nasir Hussain, Ramesh Sippy, Manmohan Desai and the like proud with Nishaanchi, yet the film would have left them all puzzled and dazzled over its sheer showmanship. Babloo or Tony has a spitting-image twin named Dabloo, who is the exact contrast of his bhaiyya although only 10 minutes younger in age.
Babloo is the nishaanchi, the precocious marksman who was trained like Arjun by his Dronacharya-like mother Manjari (a crackling Monika Panwar, redefining the Hindi mother), a once-gold medalist at shooting. Dabloo is the bonus she has received for Babloo, she says, but given how measured and submissive he is, he becomes her prospective budhaape-ka-sahaara without ever being asked. Babloo and Dabloo even end up liking the same girl once they grow up, but it’s the former with the guile to make a move while the latter relegates himself to be the ‘fattu’ of (coward) the duo.
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The hat-tips to the yesteryear don’t end here; there is a thug who deceives the dad and goes on to be a dreaded gangster, a mother who warns her two sons to steer clear of that gangster, a young woman pushed into being a stage dancer, and an overall mosaic that forces all these players to converge with and confront one another.
The difference, of course, lies in Kashyap’s abandon. His is a take (based on the script he has written with Ranjan Chandel and Prasoon Mishra) focused entirely on the moment and less on the large-stakes game that everyone’s involved in. Each principal character in the film gets to be under the arc lights for an indeterminate amount of time, and the beauty of Nishaanchi lies in the fact that nothing else matters for that brief period.
If the story is kicked off with a bank robbery, it isn’t necessary that its aftermath is to be studied for the rest of the runtime; it could also playfully elbow us into a flashback where the information that we are already aware of is vividly spelt out for no ulterior reasons. The same flashback could go on for hours together, seemingly aimless when it is affirming the obvious, but the characters that inhabit this portion make sure that we aren’t bored or disappointed. It is all about tangents and offshoots for Kashyap, who enjoys toying with the viewer’s expectations to his heart’s desire. It is self-sabotage, no doubt, but also refreshing in parts.
Bollywood, re-coded
When a pehelwan returns home in tears for being sidelined, his wife pacifies him with seduction. In the middle of an intense passage, a husband howls with laughter over what his wife remarked about his friend, and the scene ends on that note. Kashyap finds his best when he is both intimate and detached with the story he is telling, and his best tool in the process is the band of composers comprising Anurag Saikia, Manan Bharadwaj, Nishikar Chhibber, Dhruv Ghanekar, Ajay Jayanthi (credited with the background score) and Aaishvary Thackeray himself. It becomes impossible to remember the lavish array of songs in Nishaanchi, but the film throbs, screams and lunges on the back of a soundtrack that is as unyielding as the filmmaker’s best.
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Babloo and Rinku’s (played by Vedika Pinto) romance is underscored beautifully by a Piyush Mishra song, with other songs like Filam Dekho, Raja Hindustani, Pigeon Kabootar, etc., reminding us that we are in the Kanpur of Anurag Kashyap’s conception: Bollywood is re-coded here as per his tastes. Also, Aarti Bajaj must be lauded for how she holds the film together with her editing, transporting us back and forth without ever letting the lack of narrative tension disrupt the proceedings.
Yet, Nishaanchi feels supremely risk-averse because the filmmaker behind it feels over-comfortable with his style now. Kashyap’s trademark grab-by-the-scruff work, as in Dev.D (2009), Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) and Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), boasted an intensity emerging from the depths of human behaviour, whereas his latest film is contrived and later embellished. We don’t see the dashing resilience of Chanda here, nor do we find the catharsis of a Faizal Khan, let alone the helpless insanity of Raman.
The new film is still enjoyable as it reflects a sense of leisure in the director, but it doesn’t emotionally capture us the way it is meant to. Aaishvary Thackeray is committed and incredibly believable as Babloo/Dabloo. Monika Panwar and Kumud Sharma light up the screen in their small encounters, Vedika Pinto is excellent as Rinku, and the rest of the cast, including Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as a cop, is as effective as ever in an Anurag Kashyap film. But where is his fragility, which took us so close to his world and tugged at our spirits? Here’s hoping the second part challenges him as well as our expectations.
