That ‘essence’ of Bengaluru
But despite the strong Gavras inspiration, Shankar Nag manages to make Accident his own artistic rendition by bringing the city of Bengaluru to the fore. The film essentially takes you into its fold through tiny details of urban life and paints a most veristic picture of a very specific demographic of the city. Nag’s realm involves rich kids who listen to American or Brit pop music, who dress and speak as “Westerners”, who openly discuss sex, and who are soaked in wealth and comfort. It then juxtaposes this group with that of Ramanna, who has reached the city in hopes of resurrecting life after facing a serious drought back home. The director knows that in order to elicit an honest reaction from the viewer and underline the socio-political condition of present-day Bengaluru, he must first build a detailed and precise world.
But, again, like Costa-Gavras, he must not spoonfeed us. For that, his account of either of the two demographics cannot be wishy-washy. So, in this earnest pursuit, Shankar Nag creates an unusual ‘Bangalore film’ that shows the city as a layered, complex entity one hardly has got to see on celluloid. As pointed out already, the film wipes out that invisible line, that demarcation that existed between the two (or even more) worlds—the native and the colonial, the traditional and the “western”, the Bengaluru and the Bangalore—breathing under the same roof and presents it as a well-wrought, idiosyncratic place.
If Ravi, Inspector Rao, Ramanna and Dharmadhikari and his clique belong to the former territory, Deepak, Rahul and their kind belong to the more “cosmopolitan” world of the city. What’s important, though, is that neither of the two sides are seen as outsiders. Just as they all speak fluent Kannada, the film unites them as figures of the city’s polarity.
To understand this aspect better, it is important to note that Bengaluru’s tryst with Kannada cinema has been an interesting one. For the longest time, Bengaluru has held a dichotomous and tentative position in Kannada cinema, often fluctuating between being a city of dreams and an epicentre of potential moral corruption.
“The cantonment or the ‘non-Kannada’ side of Bengaluru almost did not exist for Kannada filmmakers,” asserts revered film theorist, critic and author M.K. Raghavendra. Politics, both state and central, he says, played a huge role in the kind of light that Bengaluru was placed under in cinema and the ‘hegemony’ of the Old Mysuru ethos, too, is a huge factor in this discussion.