Well after the show’s got over, it’s still difficult to believe that they made this film. How could they? We don’t make these films. We don’t tell our stories. Our history is peppered with one momentous event after the other but they never find a way into our films.

But Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Cafe does the impossible. It takes the horrific assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE in 1991 and spins a spy thriller around it, replete with conspiracy theories. Yes, Santosh Sivan made The Terrorist but that was more of a minimalist personal story. Here not only is the scale quite spectacular, it’s got a mainstream star in the lead and a supporting cast of largely new faces. This is gutsy stuff. Very, very gutsy stuff.

Of course, no real names are used and there’s the disclaimer at the top saying that everything you see is fictional and imaginary. But you know that the LTF is actually the LTTE, Anna Bhaskaran is actually Velupillai Prabhakaran and the ex-PM is very much Rajiv Gandhi.

Counting down till the assassination, Madras Cafe starts from the late 1980s when the Lankan ethnic crisis is at its peak with Anna demanding a separate Tamil land. After a peace accord is signed between that former Indian PM and the then Lankan PM, an Indian peacekeeping force is sent to the island starting off a guerrilla war with the LTF.

The storytelling device is through a certain Vikram Singh (John Abraham) who is an army guy hired by the R&AW to carry out a covert operation in Lanka. His assignment changes with time — first to make the LTF’s opposition outfit stronger and then subsequently to make Anna’s own men go against him.

But what he actually discovers is that there’s a leak within the Indian undercover team and a much bigger international scheme to crown Anna the undisputed king of the Lankan turf. Soon, everything leads towards the assassination of the ex-PM who is still keen to end the civil war and restore peace to the region.

The biggest achievement of Madras Cafe is to make its world so believable that when the conspiracy angle surfaces, it seems possible. Using black-and-white photographs of the period and settings and locations so real, that the teleportation to Jaffna at the northern tip of Sri Lanka quarter of a century ago is smooth and swift.

It is the plotting which gets too contrived and convoluted at times. While the analogy to the political history is almost unchanged, the fictional spy story woven around it is at times a little too convenient. But everything unfolds at such a tearaway pace that you don’t get the time to analyse the whys and the hows.

If the casting always seemed a little iffy, Shoojit sure knew what he was doing. He uses John brilliantly, masking his weaknesses and playing on his intensity. But to give the producer-actor credit where its due, he is right up there in the one big emotional scene.

The other suspect, Nargis Fakhri, too is used very effectively. She plays Jaya, a war correspondent from London and each one of her lines is in her own heavily-accented English (with Hindi subtitles), giving the character credibility and believability.

Of the rest of the cast, Siddhartha Basu impresses as the R&AW director but the scene-stealer is Prakash Belawadi, who plays the shifty and stewed Bala. Calcutta’s very own Arijit Dutta features in an intense cameo.

Even though heavily inspired visually from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (shot by the great Vittorio Storaro) — from the helicopter silhouettes in the setting sun to the trees getting charred in smoke — Madras Cafe does boast of some terrific images, captured by DoP Kamaljeet Negi. His fluid camera gives the movie its much-needed kineticism.

So does Shantanu Moitra’s score. Even though none of the songs are used in the film — Maula sun le re comes with the closing credits — his background music gives purpose and energy to some dull patches.

Despite its brilliance, it remains a niche film. The politics is uncomfortably hardcore and integral to the plot and for those not clued in, the film can come off a tad too dry. Quite a stretch from the crowd-pleasing charmer, Vicky Donor, Shoojit made last year.

In the end, Madras Cafe tries to sum up the events shown as the eternal role-playing between a revolutionary and an idealist and closes with Tagore’s lines from Gitanjali — “Where the mind is without fear...” — as the authorial comment on the business of war. Yet its subject never quite becomes universal.

It is in that assassination scene in the end, as Shoojit and his team re-create in motion some of the much-seen stills retrieved from that fateful night that your heart starts racing, you get gooseflesh and you breathe faster.

Oh, the voyeuristic pleasure of witnessing an event you have read and heard about but never seen. Yes it’s all fake and enacted, but in that dark hall under the power of pure bravura cinema, everything seems real. When she comes forward with the garland and bows before him and... boom!