ID - Everything can be lost in Mumbai

ID journeys with a young middle-class woman into the sprawling and chaotic maze that is Mumbai and out of her complacent life.  Based on a real event, a painter collapses at Charu’s shared flat on a day she is more concerned with job interviews and what is going on with her friends.  At first, she has no idea what to do in a crisis and convinced someone other than herself must be responsible for the man tries to get out of the situation; her conscience never allows her to fully abandon him however.  Her naiveté lets her down, leads her to take him to an expensive hospital and to find herself frustrated through indifference and bureaucracy at every turn.

Charu may not be streetwise, and completely out of her depth in a Mumbai much more manic and turbulent than her more familiar Kolkata, but she is determined to solve the mystery.  Geetanjali Thapa gives an excellent central performance – portraying well a character knocked out of her familiar surroundings but without making her too earnest or stereotyped. 

What the film does particularly well is give a sense of her journey as a labyrinth. Many times she is in a place that seems as poor or alien from her lifestyle as you can get only for her to turn a corner into somewhere even more desperate or marginalised. The film is not always subtle, but in some ways this works for it – Charu has a conversation on her iPhone about a marketing strategy for Adidas whilst seemingly right on the furthest edge of the worst slum and city (both geographically and figuratively) a neat trick that is just about effective.  It also really gets across the way that the bigger a city becomes, the easier it is for an individual to not exist for the rest of the city.  Instead of more people to look out for you, anyone's identity can be lost.

The main let down for the film for me is the score which was distracting and intrusive.  In some ways, Charu is paranoid and on edge and the score seems to be being used to reinforce it.  But if feels a mismatch tonally and makes the film feel more over-the-top than it otherwise is.  The film excels in its realism; the score jars.

Overall though,  the film is very well made, gives a really good sense of Mumbai and of the massive gulf between the middle-class and the poor without hammering it home too obviously and it is centred around a very convincing and believable protagonist.