Marking a buoyant return for Anurag Kashyap to the gangster drama genre, Nishaanchi serves up a campy broth with a generous sprinkling of retro Bollywood ingredients that dissolve into each other in unpredictable ways.
Written by Kashyap with Rajan Chandel and Prasoon Mishra, Nishaanchi brims with raw action, earthy humour and gnarled emotions that frequently unleash full-blown violence. Notwithstanding its ups and downs, the film retains its crackle all the way through.
Set in Kanpur in the years leading up to and beyond the turn of the millennium, the gritty film homes in on a family sucked into the world of crime by rage and retribution.
The family of four suffers the repercussions of impulsive acts, including a life-altering tragedy, but is held together by a woman who is no Nirupa Roy. She is the antithesis of the silent, long-suffering mother of Hindi cinema's chequered past.
Debutant Aaishvary Thackeray, who plays a double role, is ably supported by Vedika Pinto as the male protagonist's romantic interest who is much more than just that. Her character holds her own in the midst of rampaging men, including one with raging hormones that he can barely control.
More than anybody else, it is Monika Panwar, an actress in her early 30s rather oddly cast as the mother of a pair of terribly trouble-prone teenage twins, who stands out. Hers is a quietly smouldering presence that stands in direct contrast to the several facets of masculinity that clash and implode around her.
Cinematographer Sylvester Fonseca's camera follows the characters into the cramped spaces and tight spots that they get into as they battle for survival and supremacy and captures their restless striving for elbow room.
Nishaanchi abounds in murderous brawls in prison cells (and elsewhere), shootouts in smoky, dimly lit watering holes, chases through narrow bylanes, and manic moves in dance and wrestling arenas. The cinematographer knows exactly where his camera and lights have got to be.
With a quirky, jaunty medley of songs serving as conduits for shifts in mood, emotion and tonal emphasis, Nishaanchi recalls Gangs of Wasseypur while paying a breezy, breathless hommage to 1980s and 1990s Bollywood. Although it is sans the sweep and range of GoW, it hits its chosen targets often enough.
It is replete with references to Hindi popular cinema of a certain vintage as it careens through a tale of a bunch of men and a pair of women caught in and fighting off a web of betrayals and reprisals.
Nishaanchi has a subversive soul that does not shout from rooftops. The first sound that we hear in the film is a muezzin's call to prayer. It is followed by the gentle clanging of temple bells. The aural juxtaposition not only tells us what time of day it is, it also emphasises the pluralistic ethos that once defined the place.
A mother figure abjures the use of sindoor for she sees it as a symbol of gender subjugation. And a wrestlers' akhara is named Desh Premee Vyayamshala, a place where the goings-on are anything that the nation can be proud of.
At the centre of a plot that moves back and forth between the 1990s and the noughties are two boys born ten minutes apart. Their father is a feared wrestler (Vineet Kumar Singh in an extended cameo) who is wronged by the head of the akhara (Rajesh Kumar). Angered, he kills a man and sets off a chain of events.
The mother of the siblings is a former shooting champion, Manjari (Monika Panwar), who gives up her personal pursuits for matrimony and motherhood but continues to stick to her guns as crisis situations threaten the family.
Amitabh Bachchan and Rajinikanth are ever-present in spirit in Nishaanchi, but the twins, Babloo and Dabloo (both Aaishvary Thackeray), are a combination of the siblings of Deewaar and the brothers in Ram Aur Shyam.
Babloo, who assumes the name of Tony Mantena (a nod to Al Pacino's Tony Montana in Scarface), and even sports the facial scar of a self-inflicted wound, is tough and reckless. At age 10, in 1996, the boy is Kanpur Dehat's undisputed gulel (sling-shot) champ, thanks to the grooming he receives from his markswoman-mother.
Babloo quickly learns how to use a knife and a gun because treachery hounds him and his family at every step. Much of his troubles stem from his father's friend and land shark Ambika Prasad (Kumud Mishra), who makes Babloo a key member of his ragtag gang after he is released from his first term in jail.
Dabloo, in contrast, is meek and self-effacing, an attribute that is made amply clear in the film's delightfully off-kilter opening sequences that give the audience a sense of both the time and the setting of the action. The two brothers and Babloo's danseuse-girlfriend Rinku (Vedika Pinto) attempt a daring early morning bank heist in Kanpur city.
The hold-up goes awry. The cops nab Babloo. In police custody, the daroga (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) roughs him up before sending him to trial. Dabloo goes scot-free. Babloo is sentenced to seven years in jail for the second time in his young career in crime.
With Babloo in the slammer, Rinku is left to stave off Ambika's henchmen men who want to grab her house. She is no pushover. She receives unexpected assistance from Dabloo, who develops feelings for the girl but nurtures no hope of ever getting her. He is reconciled to always playing second fiddle.
Nishaanchi does not to go off the boil even when the pace of its ambling, decades-spanning three-hour narrative tends to slacken. A turning point right at the end of the film - it reveals a truth that everybody other than Rinku has been in the know of - sets up a second part.
The question to ask is, will the twist that we all saw coming in the Babloo Nishaanchi-Rangeeli Rinku tale deliver the sting that could make the conclusion a follow-up worth waiting for? It certainly has the makings of one.
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Aaishvary Thackeray, Vedika Pinto, Monika Panwar, Mohd. Zeeshan Ayyub
