Review: Madras Café.
There’s a lot to admire about Shoojit Sircar’s Madras
Café, the most impressive of which might well be the way he handles his
leading man and lady. When we first see John Abraham, he is buried beneath a
straggly beard, unkempt hair and rumpled clothing, all of which are obviously
meant to cue us to his emotional distress. Sadly, the actor, with his rather
limited range of histrionics, looks more clueless than distressed, less a
scarred soul-searcher and more a caveman who has time-travelled to the future
and is still trying to make sense of his surroundings. Things don’t improve
much in the subsequent scenes: he walks out of his house, buys a bottle of
alcohol (in a nice touch, the man selling him the liquor brings out the bottle
even before Abraham says anything: this informs us of the character’s
alcoholism much better than any dialogue could have), drinks from it, and
stumbles into a church, where he begins confessing to a priest. The rest of the
film is his confession shown in flashback, and I am still wondering why Sircar
decided to frame his story thus. Such a quasi-religious set-up is out of tune
with the rest of the film, which is least concerned with anything spiritual. I
get it that Vikram Singh, the character Abraham plays, is in pain and looking
for peace, or at least an outlet to vent his thoughts, but from what we learn
of him from the film, he is not a church-going sort. The house of God can’t
draw him in even when he suffers a most grievous personal tragedy, so seeing
him do it here, when the mishap he has suffered is not exactly personal,
doesn’t ring true. Besides, if it is psychological tribulation that you want
your protagonist to convey, is Abraham, with his stony demeanour, really the
actor you should cast?
But once the aforementioned flashback begins, Abraham becomes increasingly watchable. Whether this is because he has a physique that looks good in army green, or because he is more comfortable totting guns and making brusque inquiries than he is at subtler stuff, I am not sure. What I do know is that I had a far easier time accepting Abraham’s performance than I thought I would; not much is asked of him, and what little Sircar demands, the actor delivers. It takes smarts to know how to use your cast, to know their strengths and limitations, and Sircar scores well on that front.
That’s how it is with Nargis Fakhri too. With mercifully brief presence, dialogues that don’t need much inflection, cadence or pause to make them work, and English as the language that Jaya Sahni, her character, primarily speaks, Fakhri manages to scrape through more or less honourably. I wish, though, that the conversations between her and Vikram were less odd: he keeps responding in Hindi to her English sentences. It’s off-putting.
I also wish that directors had an easier time making political films in our country. I don’t believe there’s a single soul who doesn’t know that the “ex-Prime Minister” referred to in the film is Rajiv Gandhi, that the Sri Lankan rebel outfit christened LTF is really the LTTE, and the rebel leader called Anna Bhaskaran (Ajay Rathnam) is the slain LTTE chief Prabhakaran. Why, then, can’t these names be used in the film? Who would be seriously hurt, and how? What’s with all the ‘protests’ against the film despite it not using the real names? One, of course, has every right to be displeased with a film, but is the call for ban the only way to express it? These strictures, this perpetual fear of controversy and ban, is a serious impediment to cinema, and I can’t help but imagine how much better Madras Café would have been if Sircar didn’t have to sidestep potential landmines all the time. Indeed, it speaks volumes about his gifts as a filmmaker that he still manages to put together a film this gripping and thought-provoking.
As an espionage drama, Madras Café draws less from the James Bond template than it does from the oeuvre of John le Carre, whose spies are not martini-sipping supermen but ordinary, imperfect individuals who have to do the sort of unpleasant, grimy work that usually cannot be acknowledged in public even by the governments they are employed by. So Vikram is presented as no more than a professional who’s assigned a task. Had it not been for the guns and gadgets he carries, he could be one of the commuters we see in buses and trains, on their way to this office or that factory. When he says things like, “I will do it my way”, it’s not a grandstanding statement of his abilities; it’s simply a request that his bosses allow him to bypass the rule-book for a change. He is further humanized through his flaws (a bullish refusal to understand Jaya’s simple statement that being critical of the Indian government doesn’t make her anti-national) and his relationship with his wife (played beautifully by Rashi Khanna), whom he misses while being away on his missions. The senior RAW officials, similarly, are not mysterious folks with monosyllabic names. They are balding, paunchy, harried employees of the government who often have to deflect questions from their kin about why they do a work this risky and thankless. The work itself is depicted with a no-nonsense nonchalance that borders on the docudrama. Vikram lands in Sri Lanka. He is introduced to his colleagues stationed there. He meets local contacts. He meets Anna’s opponents who can be used against him. When that plan fails, he tries to drive a wedge in the LTF itself. He survives an abduction. And so on. Meanwhile, his superiors hold meetings, argue, give instructions, and hope for the best. There’s a gritty, verite feel to the film’s chronicling of the espionage universe—both the desk jobs and the riskier tasks—which brings a sense of urgency to the proceedings, while also reminding us of the dangerous, clandestine, unglamorous, and often unscrupulous nature of spy work at every step. Indeed, it’s clear what RAW and the Indian government are doing is simply an attempt to cover up a botched peace-keeping mission by switching sides and trying to suppress the very rebels whom they once tried to assist. The film has been accused of being unfair to the LTTE, but compared to the others, the Tamil insurgents actually come off better. True, the LTF isn't averse to violence and cruelty. But clear-cut divisions of right and wrong are justly negated when Jaya describes Anna as a man with more clarity of purpose than anybody she has met, and even Vikram concedes, later, that Anna is an idealist if not anything else, and won’t compromise on his basic beliefs, no matter what. Whether we share those beliefs or not is, of course, a different question, but at least Anna doesn’t change loyalties and stab others in the back the way the people around him do. Besides, given the film’s deft expository scenes which outline the atrocities committed on the Tamils by the Sinhalese majority—staged scenes of conflict are juxtaposed with actual photographs and footage—it’s impossible to deny that Anna has reasons for his grievance. These scenes, with the gunfights and the mutilated bodies and the refugees walking in a line to an uncertain future and smoke-filled battlegrounds and shots of choppers flying across a skyline dominated by palm trees and rendered orange by the glow of the setting sun that seem straight out of Apocalypse Now, are effective recreations of strife-torn Sri Lanka. Filmed with the same grim verite approach, they serve as solemn reminders of the cost of such conflicts, of the stakes involved in the scenario (one of the film’s strengths is that it devotes the entire first half to this set-up, to the delineation of these stakes, making it possible for us to be immersed in the situation fully).
As much as I like this near-documentary style, though, it leaves some casualties in its wake. When somebody Vikram loves dies, it saddens us, but Vikram’s response to it doesn’t really register: we are kept at an arm’s length from him. Even the visual style employed here has a distancing effect—Vikram’s face, captured in close-up as he sits weeping on a bed, is half-hidden by chiaroscuro lighting. Though this is in keeping with the rest of the film, you feel that Sircar, for a change, should have departed from that detached, observational mode to a more intimate variety of filmmaking, one which allows us some insight into the psyche of the protagonist and be emotionally invested in his plight. After all, scenes of a character brokering an arms deal isn’t quite the same as that of him responding to the news of the death of a beloved: the latter needs to move us, while the former can be matter-of-fact. I also wished to know the members of the suicide squad sent to assassinate that “ex-Prime Minister” a little more better. The actors who play these parts look so captivatingly lifelike, so much like what their real-life counterparts likely were, that you are bound to yearn for a glimpse into the mind of the woman who knows what lies in store for her when she goes to blow up the PM. How do you spend these precious final hours on earth? What are the thoughts racing through your head? Are you completely convinced what you are doing is right? If not, what doubts plague you? The film doesn’t say. Perhaps it didn’t want to digress too much from Vikram—he is the main character, all things said and done—and that certainly makes sense in terms of narrative economy. I am only wondering if there was some way to incorporate a few more scenes on these other characters too.
But Sircar gets so much else right that it seems almost churlish to dwell too much on the so-called shortcomings. The supporting cast he has assembled has got to be the most unusual in the history of Hindi films. Quizmaster Siddhartha Basu plays the RAW head Robin Dutt, adman Piyush Pandey a Cabinet Minister, reporter Dibang one of Vikram’s aides, and Kolkata-based theatre owner Arijit Dutta a LTF commander. Such choices could be dismissed as gimmicky were it not for the utter conviction these non-professionals bring to their performances. The best act comes from Prakash Belawade, who plays Vikram’s shady cohort Bala with a blend of sarcastic swagger and aching vulnerability that makes you feel for him despite every skeleton in his closet.
The final portions of the film, which cut back-and-forth rapidly between India, Sri Lanka, Bangkok and London as the plan to kill the former PM and the efforts to stop it get underway, is sheer edge-of-the-seat cinema, replete with code-cracking, interrogations, arrests and deadly “rehearsals” by the assassins. We feel the tension in the air as things rush inexorably towards the fateful culmination, and one of the film’s biggest achievements is that despite us knowing that conclusion, it makes us hope—against hope—that maybe, somehow, it can be averted. We watch with bated breath to check if the course of history can be altered, if a life that needn’t have been so ruthlessly ended is saved. But this, of course, is no wish-fulfillment saga, so there's no heady rush of hard-earned victory awaiting the hero. It takes guts to make a mainstream thriller where the spy hero can only stand and stare as enemy forces thwart his efforts. This, we know, is how it was, and the film sticks to the grim, unappealing facts, while giving us enough in terms of drama to keep things from becoming too dry. The point about big businesses being the one unambiguously troublesome entity in the world is also pointedly made; if there are any villains in the film, it’s these guys, and no matter how uncool it is to admit it, there’s something to Sircar’s claim (and le Carre’s, for he too says the same in many of his works) that corrupt governments and militant movements notwithstanding, the world would be a better place if the mega firms and business houses wielded less influence, guided as they are by no other concern except profit at all costs. Tagore’s poem, ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear’, with the recitation of which the film ends (somebody should have asked Sircar to take a leaf out of fellow Bengali Sujoy Ghosh’s book and make Amitabh Bachchan recite it, though. Abraham simply isn’t good enough for this.), speaks of a world that’s free of such soul-crushing concerns, and of ethnic, religious, and other sorts of divide. Too utopian? I guess. Then again, imperfection necessitates utopia, and in a world where innocents die in cross-fire and people have to barter off their consciences and skirmishes are provoked to keep up the sales and boundaries are erected rather than broken down, striving after an ideal, even one that is continuously receding one, is perhaps the only valid course of action. I mean, wouldn’t you rather chase a mirage than sit and die of thirst in a desert?
But once the aforementioned flashback begins, Abraham becomes increasingly watchable. Whether this is because he has a physique that looks good in army green, or because he is more comfortable totting guns and making brusque inquiries than he is at subtler stuff, I am not sure. What I do know is that I had a far easier time accepting Abraham’s performance than I thought I would; not much is asked of him, and what little Sircar demands, the actor delivers. It takes smarts to know how to use your cast, to know their strengths and limitations, and Sircar scores well on that front.
That’s how it is with Nargis Fakhri too. With mercifully brief presence, dialogues that don’t need much inflection, cadence or pause to make them work, and English as the language that Jaya Sahni, her character, primarily speaks, Fakhri manages to scrape through more or less honourably. I wish, though, that the conversations between her and Vikram were less odd: he keeps responding in Hindi to her English sentences. It’s off-putting.
I also wish that directors had an easier time making political films in our country. I don’t believe there’s a single soul who doesn’t know that the “ex-Prime Minister” referred to in the film is Rajiv Gandhi, that the Sri Lankan rebel outfit christened LTF is really the LTTE, and the rebel leader called Anna Bhaskaran (Ajay Rathnam) is the slain LTTE chief Prabhakaran. Why, then, can’t these names be used in the film? Who would be seriously hurt, and how? What’s with all the ‘protests’ against the film despite it not using the real names? One, of course, has every right to be displeased with a film, but is the call for ban the only way to express it? These strictures, this perpetual fear of controversy and ban, is a serious impediment to cinema, and I can’t help but imagine how much better Madras Café would have been if Sircar didn’t have to sidestep potential landmines all the time. Indeed, it speaks volumes about his gifts as a filmmaker that he still manages to put together a film this gripping and thought-provoking.
As an espionage drama, Madras Café draws less from the James Bond template than it does from the oeuvre of John le Carre, whose spies are not martini-sipping supermen but ordinary, imperfect individuals who have to do the sort of unpleasant, grimy work that usually cannot be acknowledged in public even by the governments they are employed by. So Vikram is presented as no more than a professional who’s assigned a task. Had it not been for the guns and gadgets he carries, he could be one of the commuters we see in buses and trains, on their way to this office or that factory. When he says things like, “I will do it my way”, it’s not a grandstanding statement of his abilities; it’s simply a request that his bosses allow him to bypass the rule-book for a change. He is further humanized through his flaws (a bullish refusal to understand Jaya’s simple statement that being critical of the Indian government doesn’t make her anti-national) and his relationship with his wife (played beautifully by Rashi Khanna), whom he misses while being away on his missions. The senior RAW officials, similarly, are not mysterious folks with monosyllabic names. They are balding, paunchy, harried employees of the government who often have to deflect questions from their kin about why they do a work this risky and thankless. The work itself is depicted with a no-nonsense nonchalance that borders on the docudrama. Vikram lands in Sri Lanka. He is introduced to his colleagues stationed there. He meets local contacts. He meets Anna’s opponents who can be used against him. When that plan fails, he tries to drive a wedge in the LTF itself. He survives an abduction. And so on. Meanwhile, his superiors hold meetings, argue, give instructions, and hope for the best. There’s a gritty, verite feel to the film’s chronicling of the espionage universe—both the desk jobs and the riskier tasks—which brings a sense of urgency to the proceedings, while also reminding us of the dangerous, clandestine, unglamorous, and often unscrupulous nature of spy work at every step. Indeed, it’s clear what RAW and the Indian government are doing is simply an attempt to cover up a botched peace-keeping mission by switching sides and trying to suppress the very rebels whom they once tried to assist. The film has been accused of being unfair to the LTTE, but compared to the others, the Tamil insurgents actually come off better. True, the LTF isn't averse to violence and cruelty. But clear-cut divisions of right and wrong are justly negated when Jaya describes Anna as a man with more clarity of purpose than anybody she has met, and even Vikram concedes, later, that Anna is an idealist if not anything else, and won’t compromise on his basic beliefs, no matter what. Whether we share those beliefs or not is, of course, a different question, but at least Anna doesn’t change loyalties and stab others in the back the way the people around him do. Besides, given the film’s deft expository scenes which outline the atrocities committed on the Tamils by the Sinhalese majority—staged scenes of conflict are juxtaposed with actual photographs and footage—it’s impossible to deny that Anna has reasons for his grievance. These scenes, with the gunfights and the mutilated bodies and the refugees walking in a line to an uncertain future and smoke-filled battlegrounds and shots of choppers flying across a skyline dominated by palm trees and rendered orange by the glow of the setting sun that seem straight out of Apocalypse Now, are effective recreations of strife-torn Sri Lanka. Filmed with the same grim verite approach, they serve as solemn reminders of the cost of such conflicts, of the stakes involved in the scenario (one of the film’s strengths is that it devotes the entire first half to this set-up, to the delineation of these stakes, making it possible for us to be immersed in the situation fully).
As much as I like this near-documentary style, though, it leaves some casualties in its wake. When somebody Vikram loves dies, it saddens us, but Vikram’s response to it doesn’t really register: we are kept at an arm’s length from him. Even the visual style employed here has a distancing effect—Vikram’s face, captured in close-up as he sits weeping on a bed, is half-hidden by chiaroscuro lighting. Though this is in keeping with the rest of the film, you feel that Sircar, for a change, should have departed from that detached, observational mode to a more intimate variety of filmmaking, one which allows us some insight into the psyche of the protagonist and be emotionally invested in his plight. After all, scenes of a character brokering an arms deal isn’t quite the same as that of him responding to the news of the death of a beloved: the latter needs to move us, while the former can be matter-of-fact. I also wished to know the members of the suicide squad sent to assassinate that “ex-Prime Minister” a little more better. The actors who play these parts look so captivatingly lifelike, so much like what their real-life counterparts likely were, that you are bound to yearn for a glimpse into the mind of the woman who knows what lies in store for her when she goes to blow up the PM. How do you spend these precious final hours on earth? What are the thoughts racing through your head? Are you completely convinced what you are doing is right? If not, what doubts plague you? The film doesn’t say. Perhaps it didn’t want to digress too much from Vikram—he is the main character, all things said and done—and that certainly makes sense in terms of narrative economy. I am only wondering if there was some way to incorporate a few more scenes on these other characters too.
But Sircar gets so much else right that it seems almost churlish to dwell too much on the so-called shortcomings. The supporting cast he has assembled has got to be the most unusual in the history of Hindi films. Quizmaster Siddhartha Basu plays the RAW head Robin Dutt, adman Piyush Pandey a Cabinet Minister, reporter Dibang one of Vikram’s aides, and Kolkata-based theatre owner Arijit Dutta a LTF commander. Such choices could be dismissed as gimmicky were it not for the utter conviction these non-professionals bring to their performances. The best act comes from Prakash Belawade, who plays Vikram’s shady cohort Bala with a blend of sarcastic swagger and aching vulnerability that makes you feel for him despite every skeleton in his closet.
The final portions of the film, which cut back-and-forth rapidly between India, Sri Lanka, Bangkok and London as the plan to kill the former PM and the efforts to stop it get underway, is sheer edge-of-the-seat cinema, replete with code-cracking, interrogations, arrests and deadly “rehearsals” by the assassins. We feel the tension in the air as things rush inexorably towards the fateful culmination, and one of the film’s biggest achievements is that despite us knowing that conclusion, it makes us hope—against hope—that maybe, somehow, it can be averted. We watch with bated breath to check if the course of history can be altered, if a life that needn’t have been so ruthlessly ended is saved. But this, of course, is no wish-fulfillment saga, so there's no heady rush of hard-earned victory awaiting the hero. It takes guts to make a mainstream thriller where the spy hero can only stand and stare as enemy forces thwart his efforts. This, we know, is how it was, and the film sticks to the grim, unappealing facts, while giving us enough in terms of drama to keep things from becoming too dry. The point about big businesses being the one unambiguously troublesome entity in the world is also pointedly made; if there are any villains in the film, it’s these guys, and no matter how uncool it is to admit it, there’s something to Sircar’s claim (and le Carre’s, for he too says the same in many of his works) that corrupt governments and militant movements notwithstanding, the world would be a better place if the mega firms and business houses wielded less influence, guided as they are by no other concern except profit at all costs. Tagore’s poem, ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear’, with the recitation of which the film ends (somebody should have asked Sircar to take a leaf out of fellow Bengali Sujoy Ghosh’s book and make Amitabh Bachchan recite it, though. Abraham simply isn’t good enough for this.), speaks of a world that’s free of such soul-crushing concerns, and of ethnic, religious, and other sorts of divide. Too utopian? I guess. Then again, imperfection necessitates utopia, and in a world where innocents die in cross-fire and people have to barter off their consciences and skirmishes are provoked to keep up the sales and boundaries are erected rather than broken down, striving after an ideal, even one that is continuously receding one, is perhaps the only valid course of action. I mean, wouldn’t you rather chase a mirage than sit and die of thirst in a desert?
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