India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975) (take two) (Patreon)

I had been under the mistaken impression that I'd seen India Song many years ago. I had a very bad VHS copy and now, having watching the version currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, I recognize two things. 1) The version I had in my possession was so degraded that the film's essential virtues -- its use of color and shadow -- were nearly illegible. 2) Unless my memory has seriously deteriorated, I never finished watching the film. The first quarter of India Song was vaguely familiar, but then things began... well, "happening" is too strong a word, but it was obvious I'd never seen Duras' film all the way through. So let's count this as a first viewing.

I essentially admire what Duras is going for here. There are formal elements that are undeniably striking and at times even breathtaking. The star attraction in India Song is the large full-length mirror that dominates a far wall, since it gives the drawing room a false openness, displaying actions and objects that are behind the camera line. Even when you recognize what's happening, it is still jarring when someone in the image's deep reflected space suddenly crosses over into the "real world" of the camera. And of course, this kind of spatial misdirection -- being somewhere but fundamentally misunderstanding exactly where you are -- is a highly intelligent objective-correlative to India Song's theme of moribund colonists floating around inside their make-believe "India."

Having said all that, I don't like India Song very much, for the same basic reasons I don't like any of Duras' writing. This theme never develops. It just hangs there like an emotional haze, one that could conceivably go on forever. The voiceovers are in exactly the same style as Duras' elliptical, time-suspensive writing, with events being described in repetitive, third-person call and response. ("Is that the French consul from Lahore?" "Yes it is.") I recognize that her prose is very deliberately alienating since, like the glacial movement of the camera and her actors, Duras wants to produce a hermetically sealed diegetic universe, one defined by the languorous decadence of the European colonial class. These people are moribund, relics of a dying era.

At the same time, I never really feel like Duras has anything particularly potent to say about her Grand Theme. In work after work, we watch her place a female figure at the center of an almost global longing, and she usually serves as the symbol for the European fascination with the Eastern other. Here, it's Delphine Seyrig as Anne Marie Stretter, and she serves double duty as the object of obsession and the louche expat aristocracy India Song wants to critique. And while in theory I admire Duras' attempt to make her lead character politically polyvalent (the collision of race, class, and gender, I suppose), it always feels a bit self-serving to me, as if she cannot relinquish the seduction she feels from the exoticism around her.

To be honest, the first time I felt like India Song came to life was at the 80-minute mark, with the intrusion of Michael Lonsdale's disgraced vice-consul. He is clearly mad, and Duras makes his character an amalgam of sexual dysfunction and Western prerogative. He was drubbed out of Lahore for some unspecified murder; he apparently killed someone important while shooting at the lepers in his garden. As with all the men in India Song, Lonsdale's character desires Anne-Marie, but unlike those bloodless mannequins, he is dangerous, crying out in libidinal agony. In the midst of the French imperial haze, one man has gone genuinely mad.

But that's a lot to hang a whole film on, and Duras seems to be banking on the viewer sharing her fascination with the crumbling edifice of Western privilege throughout. It's a question of sensibility, really. I recognize that Duras has done exactly what she set out to do, and done it masterfully. India Song shows the "sick soul of Europe," as Pauline Kael put it, pinned to the board like a collection of rare butterflies. So why did I feel like I was the one trapped under glass?