Anurag Kashyap never fails to tell it like it is.His new film Nishaanchi—a delightful melange of brutality and tenderness—opens with a bank robbery and concludes with one of the characters feeling frightfully betrayed and compromised.
Betrayal courses through the veins of this visceral and vital homage to some of the greatest films of our cinema, from Ganga Jumna to Deewaar.
Yes, like some of Kashyap’s earlier films, notably Gangs Of Wasseypur, Nishaanchi is an ambitious grassroot-gone-askew epic in the making. But unlike Wasseypur which , in its two-part marathon running-time(Nishaanchi too follows that format) sometimes ran ahead of itself.
Nishaanchi never derails, never loses its cool, even when some of the characters betray themselves, none more so than the brilliant Kumud Mishra as Ambika Prasad who is to the plot what Macbeth was in Macbeth.A man beaten by his own demons.
Kashyap’s grey characters tend to plough down the moral ground with an intensity that robs them of their basic right to be defended. Strangely Ambika Prasad is played by a different character in his youth while the other characters (including the ever-brilliant Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub as the rogue cop Kamaal Ajeeb) are played by the same actors, from 1996 to 2006.
The location is Kanpur, a city seething in dusty desecration, determined to stay afloat although mired in crime. Kashyap and his DOP Sylvester Fonseca shoot Kanpur with a mix of affection and contempt: the exact sentiment that the film’s central character, the marvellous matriarch Manjari, played by the amazing Monika Panwar, harbours for her twin sons Babloo and Dabloo.
The two are played by debutant Aaishvary Thackeray who is impressively confident in portraying contrasting twins; the choleric Babloo( a.k.a sharpshooter Tony Mantena named after Al Pacino in Scarface) and the pacifist Babloo who, while looking after Babloo’s sweetheart , gradually falls in love with her.The triangle among the twins and the erotic dancer Rinku (Vedika Pinto, whose thumkas in the item song are so aptly cheesy it serves as enough audition for her stardom) is commodious enough to make it at once funny and tragic, real and magic.
But the real star of the show is Monika Panwar, the wounded wife and the obdurate mother, a Nirupa Roy who would rather be Nadira, thank you! Panwar excels both in the present as a ferocious protective mother and as the doting wife to a wrestler named Jabardast(Vineet Kumar, outstanding) in the past. Panwar not only holds the plot together, she also gives the narrative a reliable sturdy backbone.
It is not short of a miracle how Kashyap and his co-writers (Ranjan Chandel, Prasoon Mishra) hold the plot together, in spite of it moving in unpredictable patterns. The ziz-zag of life lived on the fringes never escapes Kashyap’s close attention. This time, he puts a lot of heart along with guts in his storytelling. The result is a film that entertains and enthrals for three hours.
I wish I could say the editor Arati Bajaj should have exercised austerity. I can’t think of a single moment that could be deleted. Everything is just-so in Nishaanchi, so much that I came away craving for the sequel.
