Movie Review: Madras Café..serves realistic gritty fare

Madras Café, a one of a kind film from Bollywood, is a gritty, realistic, crime thriller – that isn’t looking at charming its audience. It wants the story told – the way it deserved to be told, without any departures from reality to make it more palatable. So there are no sudden induced plot twists. The drama unfolds right before your eyes and if you are able to spot it, you would know exactly who the mole is much ahead in the story, if not why. It tells the story from the eyes of its main sufferer and protagonist, Major Vikram (John Abraham) and never once, does the plot stretch reality to make us, the audience, fall in love with or connect with its hero.

Madras Café is not for thrill seekers or aficionados of traditional high octane action. There isn’t a single comic line across the roughly 2 and a half hours that it runs for. The drama is brutal, bloody and graphic. The narration is done in a dull, lifeless manner – a voice that has already lost hope and is merely going through the motions from a formality perspective. Yet, given the context, this is exactly the way such a movie ought to be made

Making such a movie is about walking a tightrope – how much to stick to the main plot and whether to maintain any sway for those thrilling moments that would make it a commercial success. Madras Café’s tightrope walker, Shoojit Sircar, is a seasoned professional. He walks the rope, dead in the center and gives us a realistic, crime drama without any frills whatsoever. Does it work? Let’s just say it won’t for all and sundry.  There are some of us who might get bored or irritated with the bland nature of plot development, where things just happen without all the hoopla we are, by now, accustomed to. But that’s the way it is, with Madras Café

What it does do right and that too, to a large extent, is offer a glimpse of exactly what could have gone down before the assassination that shocked the country and the world. How events could have unfolded, in parallel and how unglamorously some people would have struggled to make sense of the snippets of messages coming through, getting caught up in a whorl of politics, power games and frame-ups. John Abraham does a good job of portraying his character, though, if he emoted a touch better, it could have added some life to the story telling. Nargis Fakhri’s role is short and functional – again a huge departure from traditional Bollywood fare

I tried to figure out what kind of movie I had seen once I exited the hall. Without much success, I settled for a pot pourri of Blood Diamond, Black Friday and Zero Dark Thirty minus the thrills in all three. Madras Café serves anything but ordinary fare. Yet its gonna be an acquired taste; may not feel great at the first bite. Still, I’d suggest you give it a shot as such cinema is a rare event in Bollywood.