MADRAS CAFE Review

MADRAS CAFE

Director: Shoojit Sircar
Cast: John Abraham, Nargis Fakhri.

It’s refreshing to return to the theatres for a film that expects you to be educated, informed and attentive.

For sure, it’s informative, enriching and lack the pushes and winks to standard entertainment. No complimentary elements of hippy-hoppy shakes, treacly romance, full melodrama. Moreover, the violence – ingrained to the subject – is kept under control, using black-and-white photographs and snappily edited footage of killing in the time of insurrection.
Director Shoojit Sircar’s 'Madras Café' – a docudrama, although marketed as a spy thriller – deserves credit for striking out in the right direction.

In the first frames, we are somewhere in Sri Lanka, where armed men in trucks make their way through a stunning green landscape. They kill a busload of people in cold blood, singling out the last remaining child in a striking act of brutality. Cut to Kasauli, India, in 1993, with the whirr of a helicopter being used to transition between past and present. A man with an unkempt beard wakes with a start from his black-and-white nightmares of those same events, only to hear on television the announcement that the Sri Lankan president has been assassinated. It’s a good, stiff beginning, especially for a thriller that will unfold in flashback.

Unfortunately, the exposition of the civil war in Sri Lanka during the 1980s, and the 1991 assassination of the ex-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, tends to get too dense and confusing structurally. There are far too many rewinds (including a flashback within flashbacks, which destructs scripting grammar), an excess of locations, dates to keep count of. Plus, the supporting ensemble characters – particularly of the ‘LTF’ rebels – are rigidly one-dimensional.
Also, quite a few of the shot takings are much too flashy and quick, straight out of ad films. Indeed, slickness of the derivative kind subtracts from the film’s theme. Take the pretty shot, then, of helicopters silhouetted against the huge obelisk of an orange sun, which seems to be stock footage.

The conversation with the priests takes us to the present and officer Vikrams lands off to Sri Lanka and there he encounters war correspondent Jaya (Nargis Fakhri), from the U.K. Thank god there was no love scenes between the two of them. ;) And every event lead to another in a simple way and finally it ended with a positive message and one could actually connect with all those who lost their families in the war.
The overall outcome is technically polished, particularly in its crisp sound, background score went very well with the story. A must watch it is.

Ratings: 3.5/5