Kangana Ranaut’s Emergency, which focuses on Indira Gandhi’s tryst with dictatorship, begins with a striking visual. As a girl, Indira is pricked by a rose thorn, suggesting that she will never escape the influence of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who always wore the red flower on his coat.
But she does. The daughter will do what the father did not, dialogue writer Ritesh Shah declares. For India’s first prime minister, the movie claims, the country is an abstraction. Nehru (Sanjay M Gurbaxani) does not get India. But Indira (Kangana Ranaut) does – in her own fashion.
She survives personal upheavals to become prime minister. She is dismissed by older members of the Indian National Congress as a “goongi gudiya”, a dumb doll. Her girly voice, darting eyes and constant lip-chewing do little to dispel the notion that she is a nepo baby, undeserving of the highest seat of power.
She nervously leads the campaign to create Bangladesh in 1971 but then begins to take too seriously a Congress sycophant’s “India is Indira and Indira is India” slogan. She ignores the advice of her friend Pupul Jaykar (Mahima Chaudhry), allowing her son Sanjay (Vishak Nair) and his posse to run riot over the party and the Indian Constitution.
As the film sees it, India’s first nuclear test in Pokhran in 1974 is not an achievement, but only a distraction from the rising opposition movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan (Anupam Kher). Indira is rash enough to share the secret code name for the test, “Smiling Buddha”, with her secretary Dhawan (Darshan Pandya) much before the event.
She learns the hard way that suspending the Constitution, civil liberties and freedom of expression is making her unpopular. She is deeply unsettled. Sanjay goes from worse to worstest. Somehow, Indira gathers her sari folds to make a comeback, only to be felled by her own bodyguards.
Ranaut’s potted biopic of Indira Gandhi has no surprises in its choice of defining events. The story, credited to Ranaut, is based on Jaiyanth Vasanth Sinha’s Priyadarshini: The Daughter of India and veteran Nehru-Gandhi family baiter Coomi Kapoor’s The Emergency: A Personal History. The 148-movie is disdainful of the curiosity and detailing that might have added layers to the narrative.
The montage-heavy staging will make the most sense to general knowledge enthusiasts, with everybody else left befuddled by the parade of key characters. Ranaut’s portrayal of Indira Gandhi itself raises the suspicion that the actor who has previously played iconic women leaders – the Queen of Jhansi, J Jayalalithaa – is parodying the historical biopic this time round.
There is a strong flavour of farce in Ranaut’s depiction of Indira as a neurotic twitcher who nearly always looks out of place. Is this Ranaut’s way of critiquing Indira Gandhi – by ridiculing her?
Indira is thoughtless enough to ruin a state dinner by brandishing photographs of atrocities committed by Pakistan’s forces in Bangladesh in between courses. The Opposition leaders behave bizarrely too.
Bharatiya Janata Party leader and future prime minister Atal Bihari Vajyapee (Shreyas Talpade) breaks into song – in Parliament, in prison – like in a musical. Even JP Narayan and other luminaries join in, lustily belting out a version of Dinkar’s iconic poem “Singhasan khaali karo ke janata aati hai (Get off the throne, for the people are coming.)
Emergency shatters the fondly held public image of Indira Gandhi as a strong, beneficial leader. In this regard, the movie is far more assertive than previous explorations. But Ranaut’s pantomime portrayal of Indira Gandhi, the soap operatics over Sanjay and the uneven pacing turn much of the 148-minute movie into a slog.
It is only when Indira is down in the dumps that she finally grows up. The latter portions, in which Indira reconnects with the citizenry, restores some balance to the plot.
Indira might have been fancifully equated with India, but this movie’s Indira is always Kangana. The remarkable prosthetics by David Malinowski create a strong physical resemblance between actor and subject. But Ranaut’s eyes, voice and accent give her away. She cannot summon up Indira Gandhi’s sheer authority, her sophistication, the fierce canniness she displayed in interviews.
Cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata’s giant close-ups do justice to the prosthetics and make-up, but also draw attention to Ranaut’s face-pulling. The movie’s Madam Prime Minister is forever tilting her head to one side, straining her eyeballs and abusing her lips.
Among the decent performers are Visakh Nair as the dangerously impetuous Sanjay Gandhi, Mahima Chaudhry as the solicitous Pupul and Darshan Pandya as the loyal Dhawan. Anoop Kumar, who plays Pakistani premier Yayha Khan, is a scream, his eyebrows threatening to crawl off his forehead when he learns that his country has lost the 1971 War. In his hysterics, he is hardly alone, with the competition right across the border.
