India Song

Wednesday 11 September at 7.30pm

Marguerite Duras | France | 1975 | 120 mins | PG

Courtesy of the Institut Français and the Embassy of France

A haunted-house movie unlike any other, this most celebrated work from Marguerite Duras is an almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema.

“Widely considered writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras’s greatest film, India Song is ravishingly beautiful, disturbing, and complexly unresolved by design. Draped in Cerruti 1881, Delphine Seyrig plays the stunning, statuesque Anne-Marie Stretter, the promiscuous, unhappy wife of the French ambassador of India in the 1930s. A former pianist who listlessly lies around in the tropical heat, she is bored with the diplomatic suitors who surround her. Like ghosts, they haunt the French ambassador’s lavish, decaying mansion in Calcutta, a gilded cage of privilege that protects them from the poor and diseased near the Ganges… The film’s radical sound-image construction is accompanied by Carlos D’Alessio’s hypnotic, tango-inflected music, which attends the near-ritualistic proceedings. Like all of Duras’s work, the film reflects her preoccupation with colonial guilt (having grown up in French Indochina, now Vietnam) and amour fou… Seyrig, divine as usual and still emanating intelligence despite her mannered listlessness (think Vogue Italia), is in a sort of countershot to her character in Marienbad―in command of the formalist orchestration while doing next to nothing.”– Andrea Picard, TIFF Cinematheque