Star Cast: Aaishvary Thackeray, Vedika Pinto, Kumud Mishra, Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub, Monika Panwar, Vineet Kumar Singh and others
Director: Anurag Kashyap
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What’s Bad: The length and the editing of the film
Loo Break: Anytime you want
Watch or Not?: Not sure, only if you are a Kashyap fan!
Language: Hindi
Available On: Theatrical release
Runtime: 2 Hour 56 Minutes
User Rating:
So when you enter Anurag Kashyap’s world of cinema, what is the least you expect? A brutally honest storytelling, right? Nishaanchi is the same brutal story made with a lot of conviction and honesty. But does conviction always assure, class cinema? Well, I am not sure. Or let’s just say, Anurag Kashyap‘s film has left me confused, because I think my relationship with this film right now might be lying somewhere between liking and love and I need some time to figure this out!
The film starts with a brilliant credit roll along with the song Fillam Dekho! One of the lines in this song says, “Tum nature se masoom ho raja, hum hain tedhi kheer, hamein samjhne se aasaan hai Khusro, Ghalib, Meer.” Honestly, this might sum up my whole sentiment for Anurag Kashyap’s latest offering that stars Aaishvary Thackeray, Vedika Pinto, Monika Panwar, Vineet Singh, Kumud Mishra, and Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub!
The story and presentation of the film keeps oscillating between different time frames. However, the premise of the film is simple – Babloo Nishaanchi is a gangster and has a twin brother Dabloo. They, along with Babloo’s girlfriend Rinku, want to start a gang, but they get caught during their first robbery at a bank! However, what follows next becomes a story of love, hatred, revenge, and a lot of violence!
The blueprint of the film is exactly Anurag Kashyap’s brutal, cold world amidst a family setting. Babloo and Dabloo, played by a brilliant and screen-stealing Aaishvary Thackeray, are the sons of Manjiri, a state-level archery shooter, and Jabardast Pehelwaan, played by Monika Panwar and Vineet Kumar Singh! The family is happy until Kumud Mishra arrives in their lives and eyes Manjiri! The two stories of the mother-father and the two sons, however, keep oscillating. The first part forms the entire how, when, and why, and the second part moves towards the resolution!
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Aaishvary Thackeray as Babloo and Dabloo Nishaanchi is a treat to watch on screen. He nails both the brothers and their extreme personalities with such finesse that they look like two different people on screen! Vedika Pinto impresses as Rinku. However, the show stealers of this story are Monika Panwar and Vineet Kumar Singh. Their character arcs and their subplots are so powerful that they overshadow everything else, once they arrive!
Kumud Mishra, as the antagonist, does not leave an everlasting impression, probably because there is not much for him to do. Same goes with Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub, and it looks like a wasted opportunity having them as the antagonists in this violent and chaotic story.
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Anurag Kashyap builds his story, in another storey of the same building as Gangs Of Wasseypur. The two of them might feel like flats of the same government quarter – similar structure, and presentation. The only difference would arrive with who resides in the flat and how they own their place!
The story of Nishaanchi can be easily split into two parts – the first story being that of the elder Nishaanchis, Monika Panwar and Zabardast Pehelwan, and their love story and life struggle! The second story is the story of the Junior Nishaanchi – Babloo, who falls in love with Rinku, aligns with father’s traitor Ambika Mishra, and becomes a criminal, from a Nishaanchi, whose passion in childhood was aiming birds and killing them!
However, all of this is too heavy as the story proceeds. It is constant killing, one after the other, in some distant town of Kanpur, and the only sane thing after all these criminal acts is that the police are involved and people are going to jail! I am not sure if that is a sigh of relief, but somehow, only that part seemed logical, amidst so much wildness and chaos!
The album of Nishaanchi is brilliant, and as a UP girl, I loved it. But it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. The entire cast of Nishaanchi tried very hard to hold the film together, but the film crashes more because of its length and the abrupt end. Rather than being a badly written film, it is a loosely edited film!
The censor certificate for the film showed the length – 176 minutes and I heard the theater sigh in unison! Ideally, that felt like an over-reaction to me since it is only 3 hours. It is not that we haven’t watched 3-hour films before. However, these were the longest 176 minutes of my life it seemed. I felt like it had been five hours, and the film refused to stop!
At one point, Nishaanchi gets so confused and stuck in its time loop that it presents an entire set of sequences as a flashback in a film where people would definitely not have forgotten those scenes, since they watched them an hour back, in the same film! I am not sure, but Aarti Bajaj and her editing skills probably felt it was needed, but as an audience member, it was painful and exhausting! More so, because it was such a long flashback of a story that is already running in the flashback! I mean, there’s too much happening here for people to process!
But yes, I agree, Anurag Kashyap has cooked a tedhi kheer with this one and probably he is right when one of his songs said, “Hum Manto Ka Hain Upanyas, Tum Chaudhary Ke Chacha.” But here’s the thing, Manto, never bored his readers!
2 stars.
For more such movie reviews, stay tuned to Koimoi.
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