No Emergency to watch
film: Emergency
Director: Kangana Ranaut
Cast: Kangana Ranaut, Anupam Kher, Mahima Chaudhry, Milind Soman, Shreyas Talpade and Vishak Nair
This one might as well have been titled ‘All We Imagine As Indira’. Tilted head, facial twitches, quavering voice, shifty glances... in Kangana Ranaut’s ‘Emergency’, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi comes across as more of a nervous wreck than an astute politician. When faced with internal party pressure, all the Iron Lady of India can say in her nasal twang is, “Chai?” Quite an insult to the metal!
The cradle-to-the-grave story begins with the tone of a refresher course on political science. Indira’s childhood, we are made to understand, was unhappy as her aunt Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit mistreated her ailing mother Kamala Nehru and that she, as a girl with a strong head, didn’t get along with her father Jawaharlal Nehru.
Yes, when the heroine of a ‘biopic’ also happens to be the villain of the piece, it’s a difficult proposition for the writer-director (who else but Kangana Ranaut) to present her without looking biased. So, the lead character is given the responsibility to inflict the damage. In a scene while having a heart-to-heart with cultural activist Pupul Jayakar (Mahima Chaudhry), she talks about her father: “Ek bechara insaan banke reh gaye” or even “Main unki tarah kabhi nahi banoogi”.
But that’s not enough. What could be harakiri of a PR strategy, Indira goes to Opposition leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee (Shreyas Talpade) and tells him, “Main ek politician se mol-bhav karne aayi thi, par aap toh sachche deshbhakt nikle.” She even tells him, “Is desh ko aap jaise Pradhan Mantri ki zaroorat hogi.” Prophetic!
Through the ups and downs of her political career, while Indira Gandhi is reduced to mumbling ‘Indira is India, India is Indira’, Jayaprakash Narayan (Anupam Kher) and Vajpayee’s spirited words convey how the Opposition had only the interest of India in their heart, far more than the PM did.
These early scenes give an idea on what to expect in the remaining of the 147-minute-long fare, but one can’t be too prepared for what follows. Amid the vignettes of Indira visiting Assam to push the Chinese back, her rise to power, the 1971 war to liberate East Pakistan, comes a spectacle. JP, Vajpayee and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw (Milind Soman) break into a rousing song to show how India was prepared to help in Bangladesh’s birth. There are more song sequences, which are meant to take the story forward, but the hastily, superficially put narrative needs much more than songs to keep it together.
After the first half establishes Indira’s lust for power and her weakness for her son Sanjay (Vishak Nair), the other half focuses on Emergency and the reign of terror, her being voted out and jailed in 1977 and her comeback. Though Kangana gets her act together in the second half in a couple of scenes, the patchy tenor of the narrative remains the same, so do the facial twitches and the quavering lips.
While Kher, Talpade and the late Satish Kaushik in the role of Babu Jagjivan Ram do not have much of a character arc, Sanjay Gandhi’s character is given his due — his control over the Congress, the Turkman Gate demolition, the infamous population control campaign. His brazenness certainly adds drama to the otherwise bland frames captured by Japanese cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata.
Talking of drama, nothing can beat the scenes where Indira, riddled with guilt after declaring Emergency, sees a ghastly face as she stands in front of a mirror. If that reminds one of Lady Macbeth washing her hands to get rid of imagined bloodstains, it’s supposed to.
The web of confusion continues. Was it Cabinet Minister DK Baruah who famously coined the phrase ‘India is Indira, Indira is India’ or some cartoonist as attributed to in the movie? Who gave her the sobriquet ‘Goongi Gudiya’? A Congressman or JP, who is shown calling her ‘Gudiya’ minus the ‘goongi’ bit? Was Indira a powerful autocrat or a nervous wreck as depicted? One definitely needs a refresher course after watching ‘Emergency’.