With Nishaanchi, Anuraag Kashyap Plays it Safe and Has His Eyes Fixed on the Box Office
The strongest and weakest thing about Anurag Kashyap’s latest is that it is, indeed, an Anurag Kashyap film. As the film plodded along frustratingly in its third hour, I realised he’s still got the goods as a director. It’s something I gleaned from a tender moment in the sprawling 176-minute Nishaanchi. Wrestler-turned-goon Jabardast Singh (Vineet Kumar Singh) has just killed another pehelwaan (wrestler), after finding out he has wronged a local woman. This is Kanpur in 1996, and it’s not just the woman’s ‘honour’ Jabardast wants to avenge; he also wants to settle his score with a man (son-in-law of the president of the wrestling club), who got picked as the captain, ahead of Jabardast for years, forcing him to gulp his humiliation and give up wrestling to become a thug. In the scene, Jabardast is lying in bed with Manjiri (Monika Panwar) telling her he’ll have to surrender to the police. Being the right-hand man of a well-respected/feared thug, Jabardast has been assured that he’ll only have to serve a brief sentence, after which he will come back.
Manjiri doesn’t have a good feeling about it, and so she clings to him. One of the fiercest young actors working today, Panwar’s character clasps her spouse’s body, and asks him why wrestlers have no body hair. “So that our opponents can’t grab us by it, and flip us over,” Jabardast tells his wife. It’s such a frank, private exchange between lovers that it’s immediately reminiscent of Kashyap films of the yore. As he is about to leave, she runs towards him and grabs his torso from behind. This feral intimacy belongs in a Kashyap film – something we’ve missed in the last few years, as he’s seemed intent on proving his versatility. Coming back to that small-town gangster after more than a decade, at least the childlike joy is back in the Kashyap film.
Watching Nishaanchi’s trailer, I was put off by its look of a Wasseypur knockoff. The soundtrack filled with cinema and pop-culture references, the ‘workshopped’ face of its lead actor (Aaishvary Thackeray), and the marketing material almost trying too hard to be ‘quirky’ aimed at the cult that speaks to each other in Wasseypur or Gulaal’s one-liners, some of my trepidation was validated when I saw the film. But there were also a few surprises thrown at me, which I wasn’t prepared for.
As twin brothers – Babloo and Dabloo, Thackeray is a confident debutante. Even though it took some time for me to warm up to the duo, the way Thackeray separates his double-role through body language has the assurance of a veteran. I wasn’t prepared for Vineet Kumar Singh’s ferocious scream, which was co-opted earlier this year by a right-wing propaganda film, making itself heard for the right reasons again, after Mukkabaaz. As Jabardast, Singh delivers the line of the film “Killing for sport, and to feed oneself – are two very different things.” It contrasts his hitman character from that of Ambika Prasad (Girish Sharma and Kumud Mishra, at different ages) the man behind the curtain, who advises the crown while also trying to usurp it for himself. Manjiri is the kind of straight-shooting, firebrand character that has clogged our screens almost too often recently but the way Panwar balances the valiant, no-nonsense wife with her resigned, aching mother.
The playbook is familiar – Babloo is Ambika Prasad’s most treasured hitman. Consumed by his need to become a real-life ‘Tony Mantena’ (after watching Scarface during his sentence in a juvenile correctional home, after killing the man who he believes had his father killed), he becomes the star enforcer. Told to get someone to vacate a house for a shopping complex, Babloo kills the father, but gets smitten by his daughter Rinku (Vedika Pinto). Trying to atone for his sins, out of love/lust, he needs to stand up for Rinku, against the very man who made him Kanpur’s Tony.
A still from Nishaanchi.
As a whimsical, Bollywood-obsessed crime caper, Nishaanchi delivers. It’s only during the latter portions, when Kashyap is trying to build up actual drama, when the film rings hollow. After dabbling in a remake, a love triangle, and a confounding love story, Kashyap announces his comeback by directing the hell out of a few scenes. A shootout inside a seedy bar is shot superbly using a drone. All scenes featuring Manjiri and Ambika Prasad are electric, including the most fitting response to a creepy proposition. The characters of Rinku, Ambika, Dabloo – despite their compelling actors – feel shortchanged on the page and on the edit table.
Feeling like an heir to Kashyap’s Wasseypur films and Mukkabaaz, in the end, Nishaanchi feels too dense and too thinly-plotted simultaneously. This is the safest Kashyap has ever been in the last decade. There’s a song using Hindi film titles that feels gimmicky, a funeral song, a kitschy pop song – reminders for Kashyap’s singular ear for unusual music. This might feature among the minor works in the maverick’s filmography, but it’s also still far from being unwatchable.
Kashyap has spoken about how Javed Akhtar once bemoaned his creative integrity after watching Mukkabaaz’s climax. But with Nishaanchi (and its purported sequel, announced through a mid-credit scene), it’s good to see Kashyap’s eyes fixed on the box office for once.
Nishaanchi is playing in theatres.
The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
