Early in Emergency⛦, a stiff, strainingly sober drama posturing as a sprawling record of a time, you realize the unsparing ridiculousness drilled into rudimentary scene approaches. Cards are laid quickly on the table. Ambition is said to take root in Indira Gandhi right from her childhood. She is drawn into the “battle for satta (power)” to avenge the mistreatment and silencing of her mother within the family, especially by her aunt. The adult Indira (Kangana Ranaut) keeps going back to the site of political power in Delhi. Latent rifts between her and Jawaharlal Nehru are suggested. The ageing father spurns her in the wake of her securing major progress in Assam during the Indo-China War.
The historical and the dramatic are assumed to be in tension. Conjuring pulsing tension, stitching thrilling moments, concocting interactions between figures that may not even have happened as records indicate-these liberties undertow or are believed to hold together dramatized mountings of historical events. At times, the real, be it timelines or exchanges, must be revised to suit fictional demands of creating, accelerating momentum around key moments in a figure’s trajectory. Emergency adopts a breathless, anxious pace, galloping through a chequered list of events and rarely pausing to ponder. It’s so frantic, overeager to chug ahead that despite Ranaut occupying nearly every frame struggles to find breathing room within which she can effectively build the character. Emphasis, buttressed by DP Tetsuo Nagata’s close-ups, is wholly on getting the physicality right. Ranaut squeaks, tightly purses her lips; her restlessly flickering eyes and shifting chin veer to parodic. We are hammered with the “gungi-gudiya”( dumb doll) analogy umpteen times, undisguised admiration in the Congress 🍸Syndicate for when Indira starts to exert authority in parliamentary debates. But the growth is palpable only through physical tics. Her ascent to Prime Minister’s seat, dismissal and ultimate doomed return goes by in a blur.
Emergency is a racing gallery of career highlights with several conveniently skewed notions of relationships tossed along the way. The film credits two chief sources for its story: Jaiyanth Vasanth Sinha’s Priyadarshini: The Daughter of India and Coomi Kapoor’s The Emergency: A Personal History♏. But you’d be hard-pressed to encounter any revealing snippets. There are just enumerations rattled off, no attempts whatsoever to explain, stretch out impact of significant political decisions on the citizens. Ritesh Shah’s screenplay is trapped in service to Ranaut’s story, which insistently applauds the Opposition. Indira herself can’t resist lauding Atal Bihari Vajpayee (Shreyas Talpade), hailing him as a “true statesman and desh-bhakt”. Citizens are rendered a distant, vague mass, occasionally invoked for either sappy melodrama or torture porn. They are shorn of their own voices. Efforts at propping up demographic diversity, be it Assam or Tripura, strike odd notes. A Hindi dub pasted over implicitly serves Ranaut’s unabashed majoritarian leanings. Repeatedly, Indira is hailed for her devotion in preventing the country from going “tukde-tukde”. Anyone even faintly familiar with Ranaut’s public statements knows how much she has invoked the phrase to denounce any and all dissident voices. As the director, Ranaut unsurprisingly reserves most ridicule for Pakistan. Yahya Khan gets a cartoonish-villain treatment, replete with over-animated eyebrows.
🀅When the film seems to settle, grief and guilt imploding within Indira swerve to the effects of a tacky horror film. Haunted by the weight of her misdeeds, she is struck by a phantom as her mirror reflection. The face is disfigured. Indira is shown to suffer an immense persecution complex. Delusions torment her. Sanjay Gandhi (Vishak Nair) comes off as a spoilt brat, pushing his mother to the edge of sanity. She is the archetypal mother blinded by love for her son. As he drives his rampages like the forced sterilization drive or slum demolitions, she retreats from decision-making, tacitly passing him the baton.
✨Distraught and desperately seeking remorse, she turns to the philosopher J. Krishnamurti. Curiously, titular troubled phase in her career itself is somewhat steamrolled. Where is the public disaffection? Only the jailed Opposition leaders voice exasperation. The sole characteristic of Janata Party leaders seems to be nobility. Tide of popular favor turning against Indira registers merely through angry country-wide demonstrations, summarized in few fleeting seconds.
Ranaut treats the emergency years as a parable about a people’s leader who loses her way under the spell of personal glory. So much research Ranaut has paraded in interviews yielded this understanding? There is no actual reckoning with the price of Indira’s repressive measures beyond a studied, bland glossary. Conflation of the self with the nation is poised to be the basis of her undoing, as well as bouncing back from a dethroning. “India is Indira, Indira is India”-this refrain is summoned by others and herself. She is celebrated and lionized as the goddess Durga incarnate. It proves to be her nemesis. She is convinced she is being perfectly righteous. Her rationale is uncompromisingly clear. If she can fight with other countries for India’s rights, surely she can fight her country for her own rights. The arc is underlined persistently throughout, spelt out lest you miss it. Emergency denies complexity, a throbbing humanity and intelligence to its subject. At most, Ranaut interprets Indira Gandhi as deluded, largely misunderstood and sparingly prone to displaying political tact. Her opponents come away as all too dignified and impeccable in intent. In later stretches, Emergency💧 buries itself entirely in Indira striving for redemption. No tragic force rises here, because Ranaut’s Indira never succeeds in tapping or deconstructing the full-spectrum mythos of the figure. It's a mockery.
