French cinema will sometimes baffle me. I am, in most cases, a huge fan of the in-depth search for humanity inherent in the movies coming from France. The new wave of cinema from France helped to reinvent the way we look at cinema and opened the door to very insightful art all over the world. However, the French will sometimes take their need for innovation too far, making what I feel are a lot of pretentious and boring movies that are made for the entertainment and whims of their directors rather than for an audience that has come to be enlightened and entertained. Marguerite Duras’ 1975 film, “India Song,” is a great example of the tendency for the French to make overblown arty movies made for the sheer sake of showing off. At least, that is how I see it.
Initially, this movie reminded me of Alain Resnais’ “Last Year at Marienbad,” except that movie was a beautiful rendition of a dream or ghost story, while “India Song,” try as it may to suck me in with its elegant cinematography, just left me cold and bored. “India Song” is probably the most boring movie I have ever seen. Similar to Resnais’ film, this movie has characters that move as if in a trance, but unlike the much better movie from 1964, this one never captured my interest through its visuals, no matter how beautiful its visual surface appears or how much the characters seem to move within its tango-inflicted score.
The movie follows the life of the wife of a French ambassador in India, who, through boredom, has many love affairs. The characters in the film are the main character (Dalphine Seyrig), her ambassador husband (Michael Lonsdale), and various lovers. One lover is the attaché from the Austrian Embassy; another is an old friend of her husband; and a third is an anonymous young guest. Most of the action, if one can call it action, occurs at the Embassy in Calcutta during a very restrained party. None of these characters speak throughout the movie, as Durras uses a completely objective narration to explain to us what is happening. The narration is also done in mostly poetic prose, as the characters move slowly to the rhythms of the long, languid shots and passive score. That is also not a constant in the movie, as in one particular case, as the disgraced ambassador is being thrown out of the Embassy, we hear his anguished thoughts as screams. During this scene, I felt a little bit more invested in the story, but only a little, as the rest of the movie continued at the same objective, slow, languid pace as it began.
I imagine that Duras, who grew up in the far east, was interested in showing how alien western civilization is to the eastern world. The off-screen narrating voices often speak of a local beggar who lingers outside of the Embassy, and there seems to be some sort of social comparison made between this beggar and Seyrig’s main character. Both are driven to their doom through different types of boredom that fate has bestowed upon them. Is this philosophical theme enough to hold together two hours of people moving as if in a trance while some off-screen poet narrates their predicament? I do not think so, but some may beg to differ.
Duras does, along with her cinematographer, succeed in some very artistic slow-moving shots that, along with the restrained performances of her cast and the elegant costumes, succeed in portraying a feeling of watching a classic painting. In many scenes, it is as if the characters are posing for a picture. If that was what interested me, there are far better films that do this much better. Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” for example.
It does not surprise me to know that the entire movie was filmed in France rather than in India. As a movie, there is nothing authentic about “India Song.” It is a movie that fails to capture interest, has a style that prides itself on being difficult to understand, and is made to make its director feel smart while completely ignoring its audience. If you succeed in staying awake throughout its two-hour viewing time, give yourself a pat on the back.
1001 Movies before you die 