India Song

Michael Lonsdale and Delphine Seyrig

Marguerite Duras' India Song will aggravate all but the most hardened art film addicts. I am ambivalent about it, but the technical aspects of the film, particularly Bruno Nuytten's cinematography, enable me to give it the most tentative of recommendations. Any sense of linear narration is absent. There is no dialogue between the six actors on screen, what we hear are offscreen narrators, including Duras, who provide dialogue, comment on the inaction, and give us a backstory. The tableaux we witness are not presented chronologically, the only mark of the passage of time are the changes of Ms. Seyrig's hairstyle.

The film is filled with enervating languor. The camera rarely moves, the film begins with a nearly five minute fixed shot of a sunset, and when the camera does, it is the slowest of pans. The film is supposedly set in Lahore in 1937. The action is limited to the interiors and grounds of the French embassy. There are only six characters and four of them are interchangeable. The nexus of the film is Seyrig, the wife of the counsel, who juggles four young lovers over the course of the movie. The odd man out is a disgraced vice-consul played by Michael Lonsdale. He gives the only touching performance in the film perhaps because the lifelong torch he held for the obdurate Seyrig is reflected in his character. Throughout the film, the heat of what was then India is stressed, as is the inability of the French to deal with it. The characters can only throw off their torpor at night to dance and listlessly make love. Rot is festering amongst the colonials, what one character calls a "leprosy of the heart". The vice-consul eventually flips out and starts taking pot shots, offscreen of course, at random lepers.

A good deal of the visual set-ups, like the one above, involve a full length mirror. This is apt for what is essentially a memory play. India Song indeed did begin its genesis as a play. The mirror gives us a more than one view of a scene, as do the offscreen narrators. What we see on the screen and in the mirror reflect the past, the lived moments of the present, and the future memories of those lived moments: all at once. However, India Song is so overloaded with distancing techniques and clutter that it is as suffocating as the lives of its character. The film is color coded and uses music to comment on the West's appropriation and incomprehension of the Far East. All valid artistic strategies, but ones that are guaranteed to banish fun from the chateau. Speaking of which, India Song was shot entirely in France. The exteriors and most of the interiors were filmed at the disused Chateau Rothschild. This gives the film an added layer of artificiality for both good and ill. It makes the characters seem like hothouse flowers, but destroys any sense of the characters living in and for the moment.

There is much to chew on in India Song, but I can't swallow everything. A good point of comparison is another art film from 1975 starring Delphine Seyrig, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman.... Seyrig's performance in that film is a titanic one, the base on which the film's edifice sits. It is a very lived in performance, we feel the monotony of Jeanne scrubbing the tub and other aspects of her daily routine. The point of the monotony is to help us empathize with Jeanne's plight and understand why she breaks. Seyrig could be anybody in India Song, she is not really a specific character, because she is a meat puppet, albeit a delectable one, in Duras' symbolic strategy. India Song has lots of interesting ideas, but very few are expressed by the camera. I suspect Duras, like Norman Mailer, will be remembered as a fitfully interesting filmmaker whose true métier was literature.