It begins with two male voices, speaking while the camera travels like a myopic finger across a colourful map, commenting on a wandering itinerary. From here the image shifts to a buttery red sun hovering over some bucolic horizon. Now women are speaking, occasionally shrieking. The disorienting stillness and disembodied voices are transfixing, at least for a time. Soon we drift into and along the perimeter of the grand mansion where we’ll be spending the majority of the next two hours, a place of rich fabrics, rich colours and, most especially, rich shadows. Everything in the mansion is under the threat of rot; time, incense, neglect, humidity and the sweat of the occupants compete for dominance over all the vulnerable material things that adorn the place. The petulant beauty of the setting and the figures who gradually materialize are hypnotically seductive, but this spell is dependent on certain limits. How long each viewer can stick with India Song is highly subjective; it’s not a matter of where this is all going—despite the perfume-ad inertia, the film is indeed going somewhere—but how compelled we are to follow. I confess to succumbing to thoughts of grocery lists and laundry somewhere in the middle.
India Song (1975) is the masterwork of Marguerite Duras’s cinematic career—but what sort of masterwork? The central character is Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), a consular wife in 1930s Calcutta. Suffering from what only Duras could diagnose as “leprosy of the heart,” Anne-Marie works through a string of lovers, a pattern designed for emotional disaster as the lovers circle like hungry animals around the French Embassy. Existing entirely apart from, though not uninfluenced by, their exotic surrounding and the lives of its inhabitants, the clique of European socialites are free to indulge in their insular dramas, dramas that feed on gossip and a shared sense of what serves here for bourgeois transgression. In fact, gossip is essentially the only way in which drama is expressed in India Song, since the actors never utter a word on screen.
Both a genuinely intriguing experiment and a brilliant strategy for solving problems of live sound recording and a multilingual cast, India Song is constructed entirely of barely active visual action and voiceover: it’s a bit disconcerting when you first realize that the schism between aural and visual presentation that characterized the overture is, in fact, consistent with the whole damn movie. Often hovering around a wall-to-ceiling mirror that accentuates the duplicities and layers of façade inherent in India Song, the characters sip drinks, linger and dance but never speak—those off-screen voices do all the talking and supply all the film’s narrative motion. The real dichotomy the audience has to confront comes through acknowledging Duras’s ingenious technique (which, to her credit, never announces itself as a big deal and whose links to the story’s themes do slowly emerge) while trying to stay awake. One of the mantras of screenwriting is “show, don’t tell,” and with India Song, it’s as though Duras has found a way to have her cake and eat it too.
I didn’t know much about India Song before seeing it; I went in cold and came out feeling the same way. It may well be that going to see it with an awareness of its formal conceits could allow you to appreciate the ways it plays itself out within its limitations. But as someone extremely sympathetic to this sort of approach, I have to stick by my first reaction and warn you that India Song is both an alluring contribution to avant-garde cinema and a bit of a snooze. Many similar techniques circulate Alain Resnais’s Duras-penned Hiroshima mon amour, but to much more powerful effect. India Song might remind you more of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, but the significant difference between the two is that Marienbad is fun, alive with invention and a sense of humour that is absent in Duras’s entire oeuvre.(JOSEF BRAUN, vueweekly, Edmonton, January 15, 2006)
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