‘Madras Café’ may not be a perfect film, but it deserves praise for doing what it does in our cinematic climate.
I finally caught up with Madras Café, which begins with this snatch of background information: “In the mid-1980s, Sri Lanka was facing its most dreadful ethnic crisis. According to various estimates, thousands of ethnic Tamils had been killed.” This could be the prelude to a gung-ho action thriller. After all, Star Wars got going with an equally sobering prelude, a scrolling text that told us about a civil war a long time ago, with rebels and secret plans and the quest for a free home. But Madras Café isn’t a comforting fantasy. Its only closure comes from the bookending text at the end: “In the Sri Lankan civil war, which lasted for 27 years, over 40,000 civilians, 30,000 Tamil militants, 21,000 Sri Lankan security forces and 1200 Indian soldiers lost their lives. And thousands of Tamils still remain displaced… In May 2009, the civil war came to an end with the defeat of the Tamil rebels in the most brutal assault by the Sri Lankan military forces.”
It would have been so easy to make that Star Wars-like movie. A complete fantasy. It could have been any country, any war, any Prime Minister-type figure who’s being targeted for assassination by a human bomb. Except, the hero goes in and gets the bad guys in time. But the director Shoojit Sircar takes the tougher path. He names the country. He names, as closely as possible, the various organizations, people and governments involved. (LTTE, for instance, becomes LTF – Liberation of Tamils Front – also known as Tigers.) And he gives us those brutal statistics, culled from reports in real life. He sets out to make that most difficult of things, a fictional film based on factual events – and he doesn’t want to do what, say, Mani Ratnam did with Kannathil Muthamittal (which was also set against the Sri Lankan civil war) or Steven Spielberg did with Saving Private Ryan (which was set against World War II).
In those films, the war is a backdrop against which a humanistic story unf0lds. The sense of the war is a general one – the actual details are irrelevant, and we don’t watch these films because of how accurate they are in terms of places and peoples and events. We treat these films as pure fiction. This doesn’t mean they’re easy (or easier) to make – just that the director has a lot of creative license, the kind that Sircar doesn’t have. He is straitjacketed by the fact that he is dramatizing real-life events, real-life people, real-life places. The narrator who takes us through this story, an army man (played by John Abraham) responsible for RAW’s covert operations in Jaffna, may be fictional, but his journey is cobbled with fact. It’s the journey of any Indian operative who got wind of the fact that Rajiv Gandhi was going to be assassinated and did his damnedest to prevent it.
The film could have been called The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi because there’s no suspense there. It happened. We were there when this young, charismatic leader was killed – this was our frozen-in-time they-shot-Kennedy moment. To a lot of us, therefore, the huge stretches of scene-setting, with expositional voiceovers, are unnecessary (and they rob the drama of urgency) – but you can see why this information is important to someone who hasn’t been through these events. And you have to respect Sircar for taking the time to contextualize his race-against-time thriller, and also for crafting a narrative with no songs, no romance, no wins. The last mainstream Indian film that felt this bleak was probably Drohkaal (and its remake Kurudhipunal). These films know that it’s impossible – and futile, and hugely disrespectful to how things really work – to fashion a triumphal narrative around these subjects. The hero is not going to win. The audience is not going to go home on a high.
The enemy is always two steps ahead. There are hydra-headed foreign-funded organizations with vested interests, and they are so powerful that a single hero can do very little. There are no clear-cut good guys or bad guys, either, than he can affiliate himself with. Early on, we think the Sinhalese forces are the villains. They halt a bus filled with Tamils, shoot down men, women and children (a little girl who tries to flee is mowed down hideously), and set the bus on fire. But when the Tamils form forces of their own and when they get a leader, they commit brutalities as well. The lines are not clear, as in most of our movies, and in this murk, people fight internal wars over what’s right and what’s wrong. The journalist in this film, for instance, isn’t the kind of cardboard cutout we find in Madhur Bhandarkar and Prakash Jha films, but someone who has to decide between naming a source (and going against the ethics of her profession) and aiding an investigation.
There’s a lot in Madras Café that could have been better, the actress who plays that journalist for one. Watching Nargis Fakhri embodying the cliché of a writer hammering away at a typewriter with a cigarette stuck between her lips is a visual joke for the ages. The Tamil spoken in the film isn’t Sri Lankan Tamil but the language you hear on the streets of Chennai – an odd gaffe for a film filled with so much research. And there’s only so much you can do to dramatise exposition, some of which is inevitably dumbed down for the sake of a larger audience. But once the plot to kill Gandhi (who’s known by another name here) gets going, the film finds its footing. Sircar could have simply made this thriller, without all the attendant fact. But by opting to root these thrills in fact, by opting not to rely entirely on the conventions of that genre, he proves to be a conscientious mainstream filmmaker. And you can’t have enough of those.
Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.
Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
Abhirup.
October 4, 2013
Ah, so you finally write about this film. I had thought you wouldn’t, given (sigh!) that it was banned in Tamil Nadu, so this came as a pleasant surprise.
You found Nargis Fakhri to be THAT bad? Sure, she’s no big deal, but I found her passable enough. She didn’t ruin anything for me. Agreed, though, that a better actress could have been brought in to play the role.
What did you think of John Abraham? And the supporting cast?
LikeLike
Srini
October 4, 2013
I was hpoing you would write about Madras Cafe. It takes guts to make movie about a topic that is bound to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Hope to see more such topical movies. Indian history is littered with stories ripe for such movies.
LikeLike
Sudipta Bhattacharjee
October 4, 2013
Did you, like me (and many other people I know), keep imagining what Irfan Khan could have done with John’s role?
LikeLike
Utkal
October 4, 2013
“He sets out to make that most difficult of things, a fictional film based on factual events – ” Not really. Almost all films based on factual events.. have large swathes of fictional element in them.. The judgement call is always what is achieved by the fictionalizing. Does the story become more exciting? Does it offer better insights? Does it enable us to view the happenings from a different perspective than what is commonly known? The answer to all these questions is : No. In fact Sircar tries to humanize characters like John Abraham, Prakash Belwadi, Johns wife, Siddharth Basu.. but fails, because all of them are badly written and not very convincingly performed. Add to it the maudlin scene at the church and you get a film that you just cannot take seriously. Give me Kannathil, Private Ryan or Kurudhipunal any day.
LikeLike
Srivathsan Nadadhur
October 4, 2013
I felt the film just started, moved on and just ended. Never for a moment, did I feel that I was watching a thriller. The villainous plans, decoding stuff didn’t generate even a minimal amount of tension that it had to. It lacked a good emotional base and was trying too much to be a Hollywood wannabe.
LikeLike
Sandhya Kolachina
October 4, 2013
Such a good movie. I especially loved the performance by the actor playing the Bala character, in all it’s smooth-evil, cigar-whiskey deliciousness. Don’t we all know someone like that?
LikeLike
anandkumarrs
October 4, 2013
A very balanced review as usual. A line on the non conventional but excellent casting – like Siddharth Basu, Prakash Belawadi even Prasoon Pandey certainly deserves a mention.
LikeLike
Abhi N
October 4, 2013
I also felt a more seasoned actor would have done a better job that John Abraham. The script had potential to show case a protagonist with multipe layers, someone who starts off with a lot of conviction but is confused at the futility of the excercise, someone who is torn apart from the helplessness of the situation etc but John came off as being one dimensional. Especially in the church scenes towards the end, he did very little for us to connect with his tragedy. Sircar has shown immense courage in portraying reality and for that one reason I would recommend the movie over a lot of other recent ones.
LikeLike
UPN EarnesTaster
October 5, 2013
You have given comfort to Shoojit Sircar, which is understandable, and you clearly say “there is a lot in Madras Cafe that could have been better” which is equally important. Though the film impressed me less than most Hindi films I’ve elected to watch this year, what’s more heartening is the fact that the film made more money than it cost to make it – I feel its greatest achievement might lie in setting the track for other Indian war movies in the future to cut the melodrama and focus on evoking the maelstrom of war. I’ve read earlier about ASL -average shot length – and felt that this movie shuffled too many of its shots too quickly (never mind concerns of editing to fit the film within a set run-time) to draw the viewer in, and featured too much background music thus affecting the natural mood of the proceedings – do you share these concerns? Did you feel that the yellow/sepia colour filter in the movie compromized its visual quality?
LikeLike
brangan
October 6, 2013
Abhirup: I thought she was terrible. John A wasn’t all that bad, I felt, but then this was a part that didn’t require him to “act” for the most part — except the church bits, where he was expectedly lacking.
PS: Talking of Nargis Fakrhi, the worst instance of miscasting her has to be as the item girl in “Dhating naach.” I mean, she can’t even bend her body. And she’s dancing opposite Shahid Kapoor. Sheesh! But otherwise, awesome song and choreography, though.
Sudipta Bhattacharjee: No, Irrfan didn’t spring to mind at all. I mean, physically, he’s not the type…
UPN EarnesTaster: See, I didn’t get too technical while watching the film. I thought it did fairly well a tricky job, which is to make an audience-friendly movie from a non-audience-friendly subject. That’s what this piece is about. Had I writtten a review, I may have gone into other aspects.
LikeLike
RC
October 6, 2013
Didn’t you think it was too much like a Congress propoganda movie? The end didn’t work for me at all: Siddharta Basu’s wife wails that Rajiv Gandhi is so young.. when there were more innocent civilians dead in the blast? John Abraham goes off into depression when the ex-PM dies and when his wife does!!
By the end the movie feels like it was made with a purpose of glorifying Gandhi; which ofcourse one is free to do. Just that it doesn’t feel right to call it a fact-based, or unbiased movie.
LikeLike
sai
October 12, 2013
I watched this movie in Noida,first day first show probably my first Hindi movie in theatres. Apart from good acting the movie was sort of propaganda. There are many ‘y’ s after watching this movie which could corroborate my view like ‘y’ no Sinhalese character
‘y’ no explanation on what made the fight between two parties
The biggest factual blunder was when they showed the jrj signing the infamous agreement & the next scene they showed he was killed by tigers which actually was premadasa.
This movie was a good time-passer if u have no historical consciousness like rambo-type which sympathized for american soldiers. I liked it only for its terrific performances from support cast & a good cinematography.
btw i would not be surprised if this movie is awarded for ” best movie for national integration” 🙂 🙂 🙂
LikeLike
Abhirup.
October 13, 2013
All this talk about this being a “propaganda” is rather strange. If the film is more admiring of Rajiv Gandhi than you are, that doesn’t make it a propaganda; it simply means that the director has a different take on things than you do. Besides, I don’t think that the purpose behind the film was the glorification of Gandhi. Indeed, I don’t think that’s the case AT ALL. Gandhi–or rather, his cinematic counterpart, for he is never mentioned by name–is, at best, a peripheral presence in the film, and it’s not as though we hear characters break into monologues about how wonderful or magnanimous he is. He is more of a plot device than anything else, the figure whose impending assassination supplies the tension in the narrative. Sure, that woman wails that he was so young; Gandhi WAS young when he died. And Abraham’s character going into depression is perfectly understandable: one has to be a nutcase to NOT go into depression if he is an eyewitness to something this horrific, and especially when he had been assigned the task of protecting a man and has failed to do so. Why any of this should be interpreted as “propaganda” is beyond me.
As for the film not sticking to all the real-life facts and details, well, that happens in films all the time. No director is under any obligation to provide celluloid counterparts of history textbooks. You consult those if all you want is factual accuracy. This one is a drama, about one man’s experiences during the Sri Lankan civil war and Gandhi’s killing. On that front, it succeeds well enough.And if, in the process of doing that, Shoojit Sircar has taken liberties with facts to make things more engaging, I am all for it.
LikeLike
RC
October 19, 2013
Abhirup: I agree that Sircar (or anyone else) may be more admiring of Gandhi than I am, and could make a movie with him as a character. What surprised me when the woman wails is this: it was a horrific event, and an outsider would lament the loss of ALL the people who died. Why single out this one person, who, atleast from what the movie shows us, chose to ignore security threats and led to so much destruction? And about John Abraham – he keeps saying it was all a plan to kill Gandhi because he would have taken the country on another trajectory all together. Now that is not unbiased.
Again, I have no problems with someone making a movie of a leader they admire, just that I think it ought to be acknowledged so.
LikeLike
Abhirup.
October 20, 2013
“What surprised me when the woman wails is this: it was a horrific event, and an outsider would lament the loss of ALL the people who died.”
In an ideal world, yeah. In this imperfect world that we inhabit, though, if a blast kills a well-known figure alongwith several ordinary people, the famous person’s death is going to be reported and reacted to by the “outsiders” much more than the deaths of the other, non-famous people who died. You may say that this is unfair, that each life is valuable and the loss of each should therefore be lamented, but that doesn’t happen. If, today, a blast occurs where Rahul Gandhi or Shah Rukh Khan or Sachin Tendulkar is present, killing Gandhi/Khan/Tendulkar AND a number of others, I assure you there will be far more wails for the celebrity than for the commoners, who are likely to be mourned only by their near and dear ones. To repeat myself, you may find this objectionable–I do too–but that’s how things are.
“And about John Abraham – he keeps saying it was all a plan to kill Gandhi because he would have taken the country on another trajectory all together. Now that is not unbiased.”
Firstly, I don’t quite get what’s so “biased” about this. And secondly, Abraham’s character has the right to hold such a view, doesn’t he? It’s HIS view. And it’s not biased because it’s different from yours.
LikeLike
Sev
October 21, 2013
The post-assassination bit and all the apparent guilt on the ex-PM’s death seems a bit exaggerated. And Sid Basu’s resignation and his wife’s breakdown is too melodramatic and abrupt; these bits belong in another, less-capable movie. Especially nothing is established about the ex-PM’s character to the audience. He seems too remote a character for the audience and Abraham and Basu’s characters. So why the exaggerated grief? Abraham recovered well-enough from his wife’s death but broke down because of the ex-PM’s death? Sorry, but that just doesn’t make sense to me. Otherwise a nice, engaging watch.
LikeLike
Abhirup.
October 21, 2013
There’s no “exaggerated grief” anywhere. Basu’s character resigns because he has failed to do what he was supposed to: protect the ex-Prime Minister. The wife’s reaction receives a scene too brief to warrant the tag “melodramatic.” She is simply noting the fact that the ex-PM’s life has been tragically cut short. She says this sorrowfully, yeah, but what would be more “realistic”–her saying it with a grin? And Abraham’s character broke down after the wife’s death as well as the ex-PM’s. If we see him a ruined man after the latter’s death, that may well be because he has failed in both his personal AND professional lives–he wasn’t around to save his wife when she was killed, and he has now been unable to save the ex-PM. If that doesn’t break a man, what shall?
LikeLike
Jai
November 30, 2013
@ Abhirup: “”Abraham’s character has the right to hold such a view, doesn’t he? It’s HIS view. And it’s not biased because it’s different from yours.””
Dude, that’s rather too simplistic an argument, isn’t it? EVERY view is ‘biased’, the viewers’ as well as the director’s, after all, each of us perceives and reacts to a movie through the prism of our own subjective values, experiences, beliefs, what have you.
I agree with you completely on one point–that the film was not meant as a documentary or a factual/ precise narration of historical events. To that extent, one can’t really crib that the movie didn’t ‘stick to facts’.
But to say Abraham’s character has a ‘right to his views’ is a tad disingenuous…after all, there is no such flesh and blood person. The character is a fictional creation of the director, and the views he expounds are (by extension) that of the director/ scriptwriter.
I am not questioning the right of Sircar to feel this way–like I said, the movie isn’t a documentary–but saying that ‘it was all a plan to kill Gandhi because he would have taken the country on another trajectory altogether’ was taking the easy way out. The assassination was a cowardly, reprehensible act. Do you REALLY feel, that the audiences would have felt any less sympathy for the politician (and revulsion for the plotters), had it been said ‘the LTF attacked him because they wanted revenge for the IPKF being deployed’?
P.S– Please don’t brand me an ‘LTF supporter’ 😉 That’s as far from the truth as its possible to get!
Cheers…
LikeLike
Jai
November 30, 2013
**Just to add to my earlier comment above, identifying the motive for a crime doesn’t mean you agree with it or defend it. In this case, the assassination was a brutal, indefensible, terrorist act. I think all rational people would agree. The director could have been confident enough to state the motive for the plot, without feeling he had to invent another reason. Like I said before, I don’t feel this would have made an iota of difference, to the revulsion the audience felt for the plotters.
Cheers..
LikeLike