‘Nishaanchi’ Movie Review: A Gangs of Wasseypur-Sized Hangover From Anurag Kashyap

Since Bombay Velvet (2015), every Anurag Kashyap release has brought with it a sense of uncertainty. The general feeling is that — amid his tell-all interviews, frank ideologies, artistic generosity, acting, social media-ing, festivaling and exec-producing — his film-making identity has become worryingly shapeless. Will it be Kashyap enough? Will it be bitter? Will it be too political? Will it be indulgent? Will it be screened at all? He has diversified his legacy so much that it’s natural to wonder if he’s strayed too far (Choked, Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat, Dobaaraa) from the provocative swings that made his name an adjective. The perception is that something is lost, and it needs to be found. Nishaanchi, his latest, is infected with this anxiety of rediscovery. It is shaped by the search for his own school of storytelling, whose students are now everywhere.

The film plays out like a greatest-hits mixtape of all his early-career tropes, characters, themes, styles, names and former selves. You imagine he’s finally returning to his roots after a decade of cultural globetrotting. In essence, Nishaanchi is what everyone was hoping for. There’s a whole lot of Gangs of Wasseypur, a bit of Ugly and Mukkabaaz, a dash of Manmarziyaan, Dev.D and some Gulaal. There’s 176 minutes of period crime drama — this is only Part 1 — featuring twin brothers, single mothers, slain fathers, wrestlers, revenge, jailtime, violence, betrayal, girlfriends who cite “permission,” quirky songs composed of film titles, and characters who are influenced by Bollywood and Hollywood movies. But the result is strange: it’s like watching Anurag Kashyap lose in his own look-alike contest. Nishaanchi mutates into a self-conscious imitation rather than a timely homecoming. Given the generation of artists he has mentored, it’s ironic the newest protege of the director is the director himself.

Nishaanchi is the kind of sprawling film that has the rhythm of a multi-season web series. Its three-hour length feels predetermined, almost as if it’s stretching individual moments to arrive at the scale of a gangster epic. The backdrop is unusually generic; the modern-day nods are scarce; there’s a case of texture-fatigue. It opens in Kanpur in 2006 with a bank robbery going wrong. You can tell in this scene that the quest for Kashyapisms is afoot. The crooks — twin brothers Babloo and Dabloo (played by Aaishvary Thackeray), and Babloo’s girlfriend Rinku (Vedika Pinto) — are not competent. When the wimpy brother has the bank manager at gunpoint, he reads out the threat from a note like a bad actor rehearsing for a role; the wild brother banters with a dopey security guard to hijack his rifle. Nobody in this real world is prepared for such a fictional event.

Most scenes are steeped in similar idiosyncrasy and narrative colour. Once Babloo is arrested, we see a corrupt cop (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) snacking in a police station with no electricity, as he coaxes Dabloo to confess to his involvement in the crime. A few minutes later, we see Rinku in her day job as ‘Rangeeli Rinku,’ a booze-swigging dancer who captivates hordes of lecherous UP men on stage every evening. Some minutes later, we see Rinku duping the inspector with a fake phone call to a minister’s son when he reaches her house. These sequences stay long (some call it “extra”) to immerse the viewer into a universe that tries to be more familiar than formulaic. A local strongman named Ambika Prasad (Kumud Mishra) — who seems to have Baazigar-like history with the twins and their mother Manjari (Monika Panwar) — takes his time being evil with Rinku, whose house he needs for ‘development’ reasons.

The effect then makes way for the cause. The flashback emerges to reveal the inheritance of loss, trauma, rage, madness and masculinity. The story expands into the past, to 1996, back when former trap-shooting champion Manjari and wrestler-husband Jabardast (Viineet Kumar Singh) were young parents struggling to secure their future in a skewed system. These portions are crafted greedily, indulgently; they demand patience without earning it. Again, the camera stays on a band singing patriotic scraps (“Dear Country”) in a wrestling academy, like it’s imploring the audience to enjoy the black comedy of everyday Indianisms. Slimy Ambika takes a 10-year-old Babloo under his wing — and the film strolls through a tragedy, a prison sentence, the killing of two fathers (combined with secrets meant to unlock future conflicts), and a Faizal-Mohsina-coded love story, until it reaches the 2006 robbery.

In theory, Nishaanchi has the goods. The template is a tribute concert. The performances are fine. Once you get over the Richa-Chadha-in-GoW-level casting of a 30-something Monika Panwar (Jamtara, Mast Mein Rehne Ka, Khauf) as the mother of the adult twins, her distinct screen presence takes over. It’s as if the characters in this environment are so used to the sight of older heroes romancing young heroines on celluloid that age-blindness is a thing; Manjari appears to exist through this lens of patriarchy, where the image of defiant widows is revised to fit the fantasies of a 90s-Hindi-cinema-obsessed city (“Rajnikanth who?”). Newcomer Aaishvary Thackeray does well to belong to a rugged-and-pulpy Kashyap multiverse; his is a solid debut as Duplicate-style twins, and the early-Ranveer Singh aura is hard to miss. Kumud Mishra does what Kumud Mishra does as the baddie, and Vedika Pinto brings unmistakable Mahie-Gill-in-Dev.D vibes to the table as Rinku.

The problem is that the film is tangibly vying for cultdom. The strings are visible. Just as the film mimics the Kashyap of yore, the soundtrack is a lesser simulation of Sneha Khanwalkar’s arrival in those classics. The songs are not memorable, they strive to replicate a time when such songs used to be memorable; they also exist as padding meant to offset the derivations of the premise. The use of music is uninteresting, a term I never thought I’d associate with the godfather of this genre. The dialogue is vivid but deliberate (“men only make women goddesses for their own benefits”), and the languid staging is more of a dare to a Reel-watching era that tends to reduce cinema to the sum of its vignettes.

In other words, the personality of Nishaanchi is not organic. For instance, take the cinephilia of the film (those Salim-Javed-esque patterns) and in the film. Babloo rechristens himself Tony ‘Mantena’ in jail because he’s bowled over by Al Pacino in Scarface; he even manually carves a scar into his own face. Movies are such an integral part of who he is that it determines the way he thinks about love (“but they kiss like this in Raja Hindustani”), rebellion (“choose your path: Mughal-E-Azam or Hum Aapke Hai Koun”), grandstanding, family and gangsterhood. He has to learn how to use a ‘Western’ commode and drive a car; his 8 years in prison makes him a blank slate on which pop culture is relentlessly projected. One could argue that Tony is a reflection of an impressionable crop of repressed dreamers who grew up excavating life from cinema, not the internet.

But even this cinephilia feels borrowed — it’s not a default setting so much as a surrogate for the film’s own relationship with films. Tony becomes a reaction to Ramadhir Singh’s famous line from GoW: “jab tak iss desh mein cinema hai, log ch*tiye bante rahenge (“as long as there’s cinema in this country, people will keep getting fooled”). The story becomes a reaction to the language of storytelling in an age where mainstream Hindi cinema barely registers. The emotions rarely land because the runway is old. While film-makers like Vasan Bala emulated Kashyap and Sriram Raghavan in terms of pulpy homages and childlike wonder, Nishaanchi is undone by its two degrees of creative separation. Tony’s crowd-pleasing romance with Rinku is full of material that hitmakers like Raj & DK have already regulated over the last decade. Like when she mentions “hormones,” he spends a night researching hormones — and their role in lust — with his brother. He then flaunts the word with his fellow goons at the drop of a hat (tip). Or when meek Dabloo falls for his brother’s depressed lover, and the mother warns him of getting tangled in an "infidelity omelet” (the English subtitles capture the flavour of the film better than the original lines do).

It’s true that our reading of Nishaanchi would be different if it weren’t directed by Kashyap. With most film-makers, we start from a space of low expectations and open ourselves up for surprises; with him, the bar is justifiably high, so we open ourselves up to the relativity of disappointment. This film is watchable of course, but it’s not enough. This peculiarity is easy to like but also performative; one can detect that it’s there to impress and entertain, not express and engage. By the time Nishaanchi decides to conclude — with a TV-like “coming up next” post-credits bit — it’s tricky to trace everyone’s instincts back to the first act and think: oh, that’s why s/he behaved that way in the opening scene. It’s hard to reconnect the dots and find joy in the little details. Because history passes; the toll of time does not an epic make. It’s difficult to remember how it all started. The beginning feels like ages ago. Mixed with the memories of Gangs of Wasseypur. Tangled in an infidelity omelet with Anurag Kashyap.