While Nishaanchi is not a homerun for Anurag Kashyap, there's enough joy in this audience pleaser, notes Mayur Sanap.
The best thing about Nishaanchi is that we have Anurag Kashyap returning to his comfort zone: The rustic heartlands.
The film relies on a well-worn story, all the way down to the Hindi cinema's classic narrative tropes baap ka badla and pyaar ke liye kuch bhi with an ample display of Kashyap style humour, quirk, language, and music.
The last time it happened, we got the explosive Gangs of Wasseypur in 2012 that still has its cultural footprint in the pop culture today.
Kashyap takes a departure from the more brooding, gritty narratives, and goes all out in this latest outing that is really the 'most filmi' film of his career as the director earlier said, where the lead pair even breaks into song and dance!
There's a lot of fun to have here, but deliberate or not, the hangover of Wasseypur looms large on Nishaanchi. That's both exciting and a deterrance.
While it is not a homerun for Kashyap, there's enough joy in this audience pleaser.
The story is set in early 2000s Uttar Pradesh and follows the intertwined lives of twins Babloo and Dabloo (debutant Aaishvary Thackeray in a double role), raised by their single mother Manju (Monika Panwar).
While Dabloo is shy and timid, Babloo is brash and flamboyant and is so inspired by Al Pacino's villain protagonist from Scarface that he mars his face as a teenager and calls himself Tony Montana.
Babloo works as a henchman for Ambika Prasad (Kumud Mishra), a local gangster who was once friends with the twins' deceased father (Viineet Kumar Siingh).
A rift happens between Babloo and Ambika when he refuses to kill Rinku (Vedika Pinto), who had refused to evict her familial house that Ambika is pining for.
Like a true blue masala entertainer, there's a lot going on in Nishaanchi.
It packs in a love story, family drama, crime saga and gangster drama, into a loaded storyline that tries to accommodate at least half a dozen central characters much like Gangs of Wasseypur.
The film mostly does a fair job of managing the chaos, but the inherent problem with Nishaanchi is that the story isn't as vast in scope as Wasseypur, and after a while, the arc of the story becomes annoyingly predictable.
As a result, you can see that the slim story is being overstretched throughout its daunting length of three hours.
Kashyap and his writing partners Prasoon Mishra and Ranjan Chandel deploy a non-linear structure where the story goes back in time showcasing the familial history.
There are occasional bursts of clever dialogue and the darkly comic nature of the material remains enjoyable, but the scenes don't explode as they should. And that remains the recurring feeling throughout the film.
The music is another disappointment where it tries to infuse the same local flavour as Sneha Khanwalkar's inventive score in Wasseypur, but barring the opening credit song Filam Dekho, the zing is largely missing.
Kashyap's mastery can be seen in the way he handles his actors, and the cast is excellent in their oversized performances.
Debutant Aaishvary Thackeray captures the essence, dialect and inherent charm of contrasting styles and comes off utterly believable as twin brothers. He also effortlessly blends with the raw and rural setting, and is a good match to his seasoned co-star Kumud Mishra.
Monika Panwar comes across as miscast in the initial portions as a mother of two adults, but the actor puts an acerbic performance that quickly grows on you.
In one scene, the way she gives back to a lustful man is cinematic gold that only an Anurag Kashyap heroine can pull off.
Vedika Pinto puts in another antithesis of the Hindi film heroine as a firecracker Rinku, but her character remains mostly unconvincing as you wonder why someone would hold up with Babloo's criminal activities.
Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub appears as a minor character of a crooked cop, and while the actor is in usual fine form, his role feels terribly underutilised.
By the time we reach the climax, Nishaanchi meanders and struggles to get much mileage out of the thin material, only to end on a dreadful to-be-continued note that makes you wonder if a sequel was even necessary here.
If only Kashyap knew when to cut short the indulgence and walk away.
Nishaanchi Review Rediff Rating:
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