Review: Manikarnika: The Rani Of Jhansi

Image courtesy: NDTV, tweeted by Taran Adarsh

Last January, after watching another film based on a queen, I came out of the theatre feeling slightly underwhelmed and disappointed. The underwhelming, ‘khokhla’ feeling resurfaced with double the intensity this January, after I watched another queen film ‘Manikarnika: The Rani of Jhansi’. Clearly, January and queens don’t go together.

The Rani of Jhansi is one of my favorite women from Indian history. The woman had guts - imagine going to fight in a battle on a horse with a sword in one hand and a child strapped to one’s back. She did it all - she read books, rode horses, trained to fight with swords…..in short, she was India’s OG Wonder Woman. And she was no fictional character from the DC universe - she was real.

So when Kangana Ranaut’s Manikarnika (Rani Lakshmibai’s name before marriage; kindly read history pls) does physics-defying stunts reminiscent of those in South Indian films and gallops around the town of Bittor in velvet blouses and designer sarees with never endless pallus, the realism for me, falls flat in the first half. Rani Lakshmibai in the second half fares slightly better than Manikarnika though, even if in certain scenes - with the loose hair and heavy jewelry- she looks more like Paro from Devdas than like a queen in the 1800s. The Rani is deified from the first scene till the war, and as if it wasn’t clear enough, there is a scene where the soldiers of another kingdom, upon seeing her, exclaim "Arre ye toh Rani Lakshmibai hai, saakshaat devi ka swaroop". Not sure if that’s a good thing - I mean, I’d have rather preferred her as a good ol’ strong, natural, human woman - but, okay. Creative liberty.

Setting aside the realism, Ranaut has done a brilliant job of playing Manikarnika/Lakshmibai. Her perpetually wide eyes, powerful gait and dialogue delivery *surprise, surprise* make us believe she IS the Rani. And who are we kidding here? The film is all about her. The close-up shots, the slow-motion war scene, the framing of her glorious self on screen….everything. Her introduction scene rivals the intro scenes we see for Prabhas/Mahesh Babu/Jr NTR in Telugu films, the interval scene mirrors Sivagami from Baahubali and her ferocity reminded me of Ramya Krishnan in the Ammoru films. But the buck stops at Kangana, for there is no space for anybody else in this film.

It is a shame that the remaining cast - Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Danny Denzongpa, Md. Zeeshan Ayub, Jisshu Sengupta, Ankita Lokhande, Vaibhav Tatwawadi - are relegated to barely a few scenes and dialogues, for they are all gifted actors. The director (whichever one it was) seems to have thought it wasteful to give these characters multidimensional roles, and instead plopped them with single-line characters. For example, Md Zeeshan Ayub is the bad guy, Ankita Lokhande is the fiery villager who suddenly breaks into a dance number (?) and Kulbhushan Kharbanda is the matchmaker. I felt particularly bad for Vaibhav Tatwawaadi - after a meaty role of Chimaji Appa in Bajirao, he ended up as a monotoned villager in Manikarnika. The British in Manikarnika are like the British in every Indian period film - white, expressionless and umm, certainly not British! Please, filmmakers, cast a British guy and let him speak English, for heaven's’ sake!!

The editing and cinematography aren’t much to boast about as well. Each scene in the film seems to be contrived only for the purpose of stating facts and then clumsily joined to form a sequence. As a result, the film feels tiresome after a while, especially the first half. The crucial war sequence in the second half could’ve been easily rehashed from Baahubali (remember, the Baahubali series and this film share the same writer, KV Vijayendra Prasad), although I quite liked the concept of training women for combat instead of training them for jauhar. The dialogues are tragically lacklustre, the music is ho-hum, except for the mildly-touching ‘Bharat Ye Rehna Chahiye’ and the CGI is sad. Why, why, why can’t we have better CGI in films?

All in all, Manikarnika is an average watch. Don’t go in with too much expectation. Even better, wait for it to be out on Amazon Prime Video - pretty sure CGI will look much better on a smaller screen.


Best Dialogue: Umm...I give up. Just pick any dialogue you like from the trailer - they’re the among the few that are decent.