Emergency' movie review: This Indira Gandhi biopic is a drab history lesson

'New Delhi: After a long tussle with the Censor Board, Kangana Ranaut’s Indira Gandhi biopic Emergency finally sees the light of day. Coming from a BJP MP, it is a sincere yet inept attempt to humanise the former prime minister. The flaws of the film aren’t ideological but technical.

As the director and lead actor, Kangana tries to unfold the complexities of a towering figure in Indian political history, but what she lacks are skill and dexterity. There is vision but not the lens to capture it.

The film is a mishmash of ideas and events strung together, resulting in a disjointed narrative. It proceeds linearly, going over the life of Mrs Gandhi as if marking bullet points, never stopping to ponder. Thankfully, Emergency isn’t trying to rewrite history, but it also isn’t anything more than a retread of history.

We meet Indira Gandhi as a child playing in the gardens of her family home, Anand Bhawan. A rose stem pricks her finger and a drop of blood forms. It seems like a smart idea on paper. This foreshadows how Indira will eventually be hurt by her father, the country’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

A rose always adorned his breast pocket. But Kangana, as a director, overdoes it as the young Indu sees her reflection in the blood drop. We are told about but not amply shown Mrs Gandhi’s tumultuous childhood.

There is a brief scene of her mother being kept away because she had tuberculosis. Mrs Gandhi’s character build-up is too random, too sudden, too direct.

As a child, she sits on her grandfather Motilal Nehru’s lap as he tells her the story of Indraprastha, Mahabharata and the war between Pandavas and Kauravas. She asks him what satta means. Absolute power, he says. You know what is coming.

But there is still a lot of time. The film hurriedly flips over the chapters in Mrs Gandhi’s life, rushing past the 1971 war for Bangladesh, the Pokhran nuclear test and her meeting with then-US president Richard Nixon. Emergency seems eager to reach the point of its titular event, treating everything else as pitstops.

Milind Soman barges in as Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw but his relationship with Mrs Gandhi is only glanced at. Shreyas Talpade hammed it up as former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee and it seems like his character exists only to be admired by Mrs Gandhi.

Milind’s moustache and dialogue delivery as Sam Manekshaw is convincing but then he breaks into a song while charting a war strategy.

The war itself is all gore, no nuance. There is a needless, even gratuitous display of violence as Pakistani troops are shown barging into houses and pulling out women and children. An infant is even slammed on the wall.

There are shots of heads being cut off. At the end of the day, it is a Kangana Ranaut film, she might have tried to not demonise Mrs Gandhi but Pakistan is where she draws a line.

Emergency is a confused film. It wants to have the nuance and complexity of series like The Crown but it is unable to tell an engaging story. The elements don’t make up a compelling whole. Before Sam does, politicians in Parliament too break into a song and the film becomes a musical for a brief time.

Ridden with the guilt of declaring an Emergency in the country, Kangana’s Mrs Gandhi sees a gothic version of herself in the mirror—an attempt to give psychological depth to the story—but it is more like a jump scare from a Vikram Bhatt film.

Her tumultuous relationship with livewire son Sanjay Gandhi (an impressive Vishak Nair) is given necessary screen time. With him, she is shown to be vulnerable but that track too is soon sidelined to make way for other events.

Every historical incident in Emergency is presented plainly and even the blaring background score can’t elevate scenes. It seems like the film is chopped incoherently on the edit table. Some scenes are too long, some too short and some don’t have a beginning or a conclusive end. Kangana Ranaut plays Ms Gandhi with patchy prowess.

She quivers her chin and it feels like a mimicry but then she gets the body language and the voice right. However, her performance alone can’t pull up a slogging film. Emergency is a mere narration of events. It isn’t dramatic or lively. It is just Indira Gandhi’s life flashing before our eyes.

Director: Kangana Ranaut