India Song (1974)

Before I watched India Song, I didn't even know that Marguerite Duras was also a director of films. If you expect the typical literary film, talky, with a very slight attention to the medium of film - think again. India Song is something else, a hypnotic masterpiece of slow motion bourgeois decadence (but the decadence does not look alluring). There is no dialogue in the typical sense of the word. Instead, the film fuses dreamy&slow images (repetition is often used) and polyphonic narration. Sometimes it is easy to combine the voices and the images, but at times the relation is not straightforward (non-synchronous sound), nor is there a clear linear story to follow. It's a beautiful movie, but what kind of beauty is it? Duras' brings forth a world that is more dead than alive, real life only intruding as an outsider, a sudden rupture. India. Sometimes during the 1930's. A string of men pursue a bored consular wife. A big mansion. In several frames, the camera approaches the mansion from the outside. It looks abandoned, decaying. Desolate surroundings. Are the people we see in the film dead? There are hints of death, suicide, but it is not clear. People dance. Sometimes we see them through mirrors. A piano is playing. The same song, over and over and over again. The camera shows the piano, but nobody is playing it, but we hear the music. The effect is eerie. People lie on the floor. Perhaps they have had sex. They look like puppets, very, very still - they look dead. A man expresses his love for the woman. Voices explain it. A sudden rush of emotion shatters the numb and languorous atmosphere of the film, his desperate screams haunt the group. There is also another story, a fractured story, but it is important: we hear a beggar woman. We never see her, but we hear her voice, and her story is told. I suspect there is a connection between the beggar and the consular wife. The characters' world is a narrow one. They seem locked up within these strange social patterns, they seem locked up within their bodies. On some level, this is the kind of story one comes across in Graham Greene novels: the alienated colonialist, at home nowhere.

The visual style and idiosyncratic storytelling of India Song have some similarities with the films made by Resnais, perhaps, most of all, Last Year in Marienbad (and yeah, the connection is not accidental, Duras wrote Hiroshima, mon amour). These films are enigmas, but they are not films that make you engage in the kind of work where you are supposed to reassemble fragments into a coherent story. India Song defies that kind of intellectualistic approach.