Madras Cafe
Madras Cafe is a 2013 Indian Hindi-language political action thriller film directed by Shoojit Sircar and produced by John Abraham and Ronnie Lahiri under the banners JA Entertainment and Rising Sun Films. The film stars John Abraham, Nargis Fakhri and Raashii Khanna in the lead roles. The film is set in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the time of Indian intervention in the Sri Lankan civil war and assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The film revolves around an Indian soldier who is appointed by the intelligence agency R&AW to head covert operations in Northern Sri Lanka shortly after Indian peace-keeping force was forced to withdraw.
Madras Cafe was released on 23 August 2013, to positive reviews from critics. The film was declared as an above average grosser at the box office. The film won the National Film Award for Best Audiography for Nihar Ranjan Samal and Bishwadeep Chatterjee at the 61st National Film Awards.
Plot
The plot opens in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, where a bus full of Tamil passengers is stopped by armed Sinhalese men and all are massacred.A man in Kasauli, revealed to be Vikram Singh sees on TV that the Sri Lankan President has been killed by a suicide bomber. In a nearby church he confesses to Priest, "Our Prime Minister could have been saved from the conspiracy." and Vikram starts narrating his story to the priest.
The film then moves five years back, where clashes between the Sri Lankan Government Forces and Tamil militant groups had reached a dangerous level. The Tamil youth have taken weapons and joined the Liberation Tamil Front leader Anna Bhaskaran. The Indian Prime Minister decides to sign a peace accord with the Sri Lankan Government. However, Anna refuses to accept the accord, and the Indian Peacekeeping Forces are forced to withdraw from the island. Robin Dutt, aka RD, the R&AW chief, calls upon his best man, Maj. Vikram Singh.
After meeting and discussing the strategy with RD and his deputy Swaroop, Vikram travels to Sri Lanka and meets a war correspondent, Jaya Sahni. After reporting to his senior Balakrishnan, he tries to find someone who may help to find Shri, the only man who can withstand and oppose Anna. Vikram manages to visit Shri and promises Shri to help him rise against Anna by providing him with arms. However, the deal goes terribly wrong, and one of Vikram's associates is killed in a surprise attack by LTF, who do away with the weapons consignment.
Meanwhile, Vikram is kidnapped by LTF. The Indian government sends forces and rescues Vikram. Balakrishnan tells him to leave Sri Lanka as he is on the hit list of both camps. Vikram feels suspicious about Balakrishnan. He calls SP, one of his associates, and tells him to report all activities of Balakrishnan. Vikram, posing as a war correspondent, meets Mallayya, second-in-command of Anna, and persuades him to meet RD in Colombo. RD instigates Mallaya to stand up as the only champion of his people, thus dividing the LTF in two.
The Indian military then launches a massive attack on the LTF base camp, However, Anna survives and later kills Malaya and Shri. In the light of the resurfaced violence, the Indian Prime Minister resigns. Some months later, SP later tracks some discussion of Anna over the phone and tells Balakrishnan about this, but Bala tells him to ignore them, causing SP to believe that Balakrishnan might be a mole. He escapes with the intercepts and files of the case. Vikram receives a call from SP, who tells him to meet him. After meeting with SP, Vikram comes home to find Ruby, his wife, murdered. Vikram nabs Vasu from a theatre and asks him what he knows. Vasu tells him that indeed Balakrishnan was a leak, and he was helping him and Reed. Vikram calls Jaya and requests for help from her sources.
As told by Jaya, Vikram reaches Bangkok, where a source of Jaya tells him that he has a tape. Vikram is shocked to see that Balakrishnan was honeytrapped, forcing him to divulge all the information about their movements. Balakrishnan later commits suicide by shooting himself.
Back in Delhi, RAW had decoded the intercepts realizes that this might be a Code Red to assassinate the ex-Prime Minister. A massive manhunt begins, and hundreds of LTF associates are nabbed by Indian security forces and local cops. In the Madras R&AW tracks down the conversation of Vijayan Joseph, a bombmaker, and Anna. Vikram finds that Kannan Kanan, an associate of Anna's man Kanda, is in Madurai Jail and might be helpful. Kannan reveals that some suspicious refugees came from the island to Tamil Nadu.
After a short meeting with Jaya, Vikram sees X on a clock at the airport and deduces that the LTF is going to assassinate the ex-PM on the same day at X PM. RD then calls the ex-PM to cancel his rally, but he replies that he'll be alright. Vikram then manages to catch Vijayan joseph from his hideout, who tells him that the refugees are going to assassinate the ex-PM with plastic explosives, which are untraceable by metal detectors.
Vikram rushes to the place where the ex-PM is taking part in the rally, but the suicide bomber manages to put the wreath on the neck of the ex-PM, and while bowing down, she pulls the trigger and kills him along with herself and many others. Vikram feels dejected and defeated. Later, Vikram submits his report on the assassination to the investigation committee. A few days later, RD too resigns, and Vikram, after taking voluntary retirement, comes to Kasauli.
The film comes back to the present, where the priest asks Vikram who won the battle. Vikram says he doesn't know, but in this battle, the Indians lost their Prime Minister, and the Sri Lankans lost their future. He later walks away, reciting the lines, "Where the mind is without fear." He completes another report and sends it to Jaya in London, who starts her work on that report;
In Kasauli, Vikram is seen coming out of the house he was living in.
The end credits reveal that many Sri Lankan Tamils remain displaced abroad till this date.
Cast
- John Abraham as Major Vikram Singh. Singh is fictitious, Sircar said he had "used real references, portrayed militant groups, revolutionary freedom fighters, Indian Peace Keeping Forces and shown how India got involved and the chaos". "I didn't want to make glitzy thriller like Ek Tha Tiger or Agent Vinod, which seem inspired by the James Bond template. I want to show that intelligence officers are ordinary people who live amongst us. It is only that they have to solve issues where national security is at stake," says Sircar. Sircar says he needed an actor who can easily get lost in the crowd, but with John Abraham, it seems next to impossible. "The role also requires a certain level of physicality and John Abraham has worked for the role. I agree this is a new territory for him but I think he has pitched it right. Let's see how the audiences take him."
- Nargis Fakhri as Jaya Sahni As for Fakhri, Sircar says her voice has not been dubbed. "Nargis Fakhri is playing a foreign war correspondent. I needed a girl who looks like an Indian journalist but has an accent so there is no chance that the audience will remember her Rockstar performance while watching Madras Café. She will converse in English and she is familiar with the language," says Sircar.
- Raashii Khanna as Ruby Singh, wife of Major Vikram Singh
- Siddhartha Basu as Robin Dutt, chief of Research and Analysis Wing. He is Major Singh's mentor and appoints him to take sole responsibility of executing the covert operations in Sri Lanka
- Ajay Rathnam as Anna Bhaskaran, the leader of the fictional LTF militant group. The character closely resembles the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. Bhaskaran is the given name of the character. 'Anna' meaning elder brother in Tamil, is an honorific prefixed to the name of the character Bhaskaran.
- Prakash Belawadi as Bala, Major Vikram Singh's superior in Jaffna. Due to his long stint in Sri Lanka, Bala is the only one who has first-hand information on the reality of the situation. As Major Singh arrives to execute his covert operation, Bala and his team help him to get access to locations and people who are crucial to making the operation successful. Bala was inspired by a real-life R&AW mole known as KV Unnikrishnan. KV Unnikrishnan, the agency's station chief in Chennai in 1987, was honey-trapped by the CIA. The US spy service threatened to reveal Unnikrishnan's compromising photographs with an air hostess to force him to co-operate.
- Avijit Dutt as Swaroop, RD's deputy in R&AW.
- Tinu Menachery as a Tamil rebel
- Agnello Dias as a Sri Lankan minister
- Dinesh Prabhakar as Rajasekharan, LTF member
- Sanjay Gurbaxani as Former Prime Minister of India
- Piyush Pandey as the Cabinet Secretary of India
- Aayam Mehta as Vasu
- Dibang as a former intelligence officer
- Leena Maria Paul as a RAW Decoder
Production