When the first part of Anurag Kashyap’s sharpshooting drama released a few months ago, it had a few takers. The failure was inexplicable: Nishanchi was a drama-driven epic, volatile, mercurial, unpredictable and enormously stylish in its small-town rusticity.
A few months later Amazon Prime has quietly begun streaming both the parts of Nishanchi together. Part 2 brings us the tumultuous story of the twins Babloo and Dabloo, one fire the other ice, one Amitabh Bachchan, the other Shashi Kapoor, and their not-so-common love interest the dirty dancer Rangeeli Rinku (Vedika Pinto) from Kanpur who is now Rinku Rani in Lucknow, and doing well for herself, thank you, in spite of the looming leering all around her.
Part 2 opens with Rinku ‘auditioning’ for a bunch of perverts who suggest she show more skin.
“I might as well dance naked,” Rinku says sarcastically.
“Yes yes, there is a big demand for that,” the leering bunch replies, dodging Rinku’s sarcasm faster than the sniper bullets that fly at the climax of this crackling saga. The dialogues are skin-toned to show the characters as humorists in search of reasons to laugh about their life and profession.
The characters from Part 1 are still struggling with their conscience, still trying to figure out why fate has dealt them such cruel blows. But there is no self-pity here, no fighting fate. This is what empowers the characters and the film: the ability to stare at abject misfortune in its face without flinching.
For a film seething in anger, there is much less violence here than in Anurag Kashyap’s other rural dramas. Only one head gets blown off, and that too at the end, and not a moment too soon. There is an undercurrent of justice even when the characters face the worst kind of blows, the visible and otherwise.
A new character Anjana (played with refreshing guilelessness by Erika Jason) is rudely roughed up by the cop villain Kamal Ajeeb (the brilliant Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) who continues in Part 2 to chew paan in every single frame (some things never change).
Anjana’s brief relationship with Babloo comes to a sticky end. But not before they cuddle up in a rickety cinema hall watching Amitabh Bachchan in Coolie.
That is one of the many admirable aspects of Kashyap’s fire-and-ice epic: periodicity is never over-punctuated. The era speaks to us without exaggeration. After Aaishvary Thackeray (whose Dabloo and Baloo is more distinctive than Dilip Kumar’s Ram Aur Shyam) and Monika Pawar (whose Mother India act is a work of art), cinematographer Sylvester Fonseca is the star of the show, imbuing every frame with a casual classicism.
Part 2 of Nishanchi is a befitting farewell to an epic saga of crime and little punishment, violence with meagre space for emotions. Every moment of the 2 hour 26 minute sequel is constructed with the rare care that makes us stare in awe and satisfaction.
Ten years from now Nishanchi will be regarded as one of Anurag Kashyap’s stand-out works filled with sound and fury signifying something solid and durable.
