Emergency: Kangana Ranaut’s cringe-worthy film is vain, vapid, and worryingly irresponsible | Bollywood News

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Kangana Ranaut in a still from Emergency.

For starters, one look at Ranaut’s fake nose will send you spiralling into conspiracy theory mode. Did she send one of her siblings to Australia, have them infiltrate the Furiosa set, and steal prosthetics meant for Chris Hemsworth’s lunatic villain Dementus? It’s possible. So cartoonish is this nose that it would be considered a hate crime were this movie released in post-war America. It’s distracting to look at, but more problematically, its mere existence coats every scene that Ranaut is in with a layer of unintentional comedy. And not only is she in virtually every scene, she insists on framing herself in tight close-ups, exposing not only the comical contours of her garish make-up, but also her limited range as a performer.

Speaking of post-war America, perhaps the one scene that encapsulates Emergency’s flaws is the one in which she has a meeting with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. Forget finding a nicely tailored suit for the man playing the President — in many ways, his legacy is as worrying as Indira’s — the costume department couldn’t even be bothered to tuck his shirt in for the scene. Filmed in a simple shot-reverse-shot, the scene appears to have been important for Ranaut. She breaks out every weapon in her arsenal — facial ticks, head-bobbing, rapid batting of the eyes. Her voice, which appears to change every few minutes, is particularly exaggerated as she engages Nixon in a battle of egos. But there’s little psychological insight on offer. Emergency would have you believe that the only reason why she plunged India into the Bangladesh conflict was because Nixon kept her waiting at the White House.

In Emergency, we don’t actually watch Operation Blue Star unfold. We watch Indira as she watches Operation Blue Star unfold. On television. Like Christopher Nolan did with Oppenheimer, Ranaut could make the argument that we are witnessing Indian history through Indira’s eyes. “India is Indira, and Indira is India,” she declares with the self-satisfaction of a baby who has just swallowed their first-ever bite of pizza. But while Nolan had a valid point — after all, Oppenheimer was presented almost exclusively through its protagonist’s perspective — Ranaut can’t make the same excuse, because several scenes in Emergency focus on the opposition, led by JP Narayan and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

But despite getting an entire musical sequence to themselves — the characters break into song as the Indian Army destroys Pakistani forces — folks like JP, Vajpayee, and Sam Maneckshaw are given a step-motherly treatment by Ranaut and her writer, Ritesh Shah. Speaking of which, even Sanjay Gandhi, who is projected like Joffrey Baratheon from Game of Thrones, gets only a handful of scenes. Each of them, minus the one in which he’s painting the town red with Sara Ali Khan’s actual grandmother, involves Indira. The only conclusion that you can realistically come to is that Ranaut wants the spotlight to be on her, and nobody else.

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Kangana Ranaut in a still from Emergency.

By allowing herself to be bogged down by the superficiality of it all — the voice, the tilt of the head, the constant blinking — she neglects to investigate who Indira was as a person. And by virtue of Indira being the martyr protagonist of the film, pitted against clearly defined villains and being blessed with a redemption arc, it appears that Ranaut has a soft corner for her subject. Or, at least, a soft corner for the idea of authoritarianism. Sometimes, the movie suggests, a leader who rules with an iron fist is just what people need. It’s for their own good. These are irresponsible, even dangerous ideas. It’s like Ranaut watched Vikramaditya Motwane’s unreleased Indira documentary and learned all the wrong lessons from it. But you’re barely able to shake your fist at your screen because of how ineptly put together Emergency is.

It’s a fallacy that Ranaut is a good actor. She struggles to maintain a uniform vocal texture throughout the film. In one scene, she’s speaking in an exaggerated, high-pitched voice. In another, she’s sounding like she’s on Koffee with Karan, discussing nepotism. The movie covers decades in Indira’s life, but Ranaut’s physical performance doesn’t change. There’s a difference in how a 20-year-old carries themselves, versus how a 60-year-old would. Dissatisfying as Maestro was, Cooper made sure that Leonard Bernstein walked, talked, and behaved in an age-appropriate manner. More importantly, he didn’t let a prosthetic nose get in the way of storytelling.

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