“Spectral … India Song​’s entirely asynchronous soundtrack [looks] forward to something like Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, which likewise draws the viewer into a dispersed atmosphere of lush sorrow, and pushes its story scaffolding to extremes of aural detachment and spatial alienation.”

Lawrence Garcia, MUBI Notebook

Marguerite Duras had already established herself as one of the major figures of postwar French literature when she launched an equally fascinating and unclassifiable career in cinema, translating her elliptical, experimental style to the screen through an unprecedented fusion of hypnotic, highly stylized imagery and radically disjunctive sound. Duras’s most celebrated work India Song is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s Calcutta, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig, Jeanne Dielman) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other. —Janus Films

In French with English subtitles

“Duras’s thin dramas are perceived through layers upon layers of style—she’s the Busby Berkeley of structuralism … In this film, she uses constantly shifting tenses, rigorous patterns of camera movement (and stillness), acting boiled down to broad isolated gestures, nonsynchronous dialogue (often between characters who don’t appear in the visuals), and a dozen other radical devices.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“Nobody possesses a complete form of knowledge. Nobody is entirely ignorant. But everyone knows that they cannot know everything. It is with this baggage, riddled with holes, and with an essential and permanent fear of lies, that I tried to trace the filmed proposition that is India Song.”

Marguerite Duras
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