brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

When a worn 16mm copy of India Song hit our town in the early, post-punk eighties, it created an immediate sensation among the local cinefiles. Several people watched it again and again, and of course some clever bastards started writing articles about its aesthetics, "The aesthetics of absence" or something like that. Almost at the same time, the first solo LP by Richard Jobson of The Skids appeared, with its opening track repeating the hypnotic theme of India Song and Mr. Jobson himself reciting his version of the plot of the movie and making a homage to Duras at the same time. Then the recorded voice of Duras herself also appeared on a double album released by the fashionable Belgian label Les disques du crepuscule. It felt almost as Duras was as contemporary as New Order or The Birthday Party.Myself, I watched the movie twice and was as hypnotized by its voices as by its visuals. I remember the instant effect of the opening scene: A long, static shot of the hazy, setting sun accompanied by two off screen, female narrators. In a very musical manner they took turns telling the story of the beggar woman who walked from Indochina to Calcutta, followed by the song-like voice of the woman herself. The way the narrators talked in forms of short questions and even shorter answers, as if they were also spectators commenting the visuals (or making up the non- visuals), was something I never had experienced in a movie before, and something I immediately felt as "a shock of the new" or whatever, anyway as something beautiful beyond my understanding, or lack of understanding as the plot started getting more complicated, with even more narrators joining in. I gave it all up but loved it anyway. It remained for years a special cinematic memory, on par with discovering Tarkovsky's Mirror at about the same time. But then, unlike the films of Tarkovsky, which were shown over and over, India Song completely vanished from the local screens. The other films by Duras never even appeared.Now, about thirty years later, with none of my then fellow watchers around, I have seen and heard the DVD of India Song some more times, as well as a handful of others by Duras. It is without doubt still a very special movie indeed, and I guess the best of the bunch, although Nathalie Granger comes close. But I am still also almost at a loss trying to understand why this movie is so powerful. I admit that the dark and grainy 16mm look is nothing special. And no, the french settings around the Château does not look much like the heated delta land in India mentioned in the dialogues. But no, it does not matter. So what is it? Well... The music and the voices! It captures me every time; the way the bewildering narration and the slow piano blues or the upbeat orchestra waltzes blend together with the static or slowly panned visuals. I may now begin to unravel the plot, but hope never to come to a full understanding; the theme of the "Lepers of the heart" caught in their colonial abyss playing out their hopeless love affairs sets the tone, but the finer points of the narrative will forever elude me, I hope.I can see why the movie is so much discussed in academic circles and why it is hated so much by the average movie fan. Despite its complexities, it seems quite simple. Love it or leave it. A complexity: As with other work by Duras, there is a lot of discrepancies between what we hear and what we see. The actors does not speak, yet we hear their voices. They move off screen, yet we still hear their voices. They all seem to deceive one another, yet the attraction of the central Anne Marie Stretter is never in doubt. But we cannot see why; is it because she is the only white female around? The only remains of a white, piano-driven elegance among the (never seen) beggars and lepers and the smell of death (incense). She is a mystery I guess, and that is her attraction. The simplicity: Long, static shots and characters moving ever so slowly or just posing as a still life. Even fans of Marienbad might lose their temper. But for me, India Song is the better of the two. It goes right to my heart. Perhaps it is its female quality.

This was meant as hypnotic cinema for people who aren't hypnotized by watching junk, who aren't hypnotized by Spielberg; if you don't like it, leave it alone, it just wasn't meant for you, do not cheat—it's tricky not to cheat. What some claim it is boring only brings forth a person's own deficiencies. It only brings forth the garbage inside, your own inabilities and defects. Confronting those is certainly tough. It's the gist of the cinema to hypnotize; and it's not the storyline, or the plot, that which hypnotizes. Resnais, Robbe—Grillet, Mme. Duras, Tati do that. By asking less from the cinema, one cheats, and one feels it. In its way, this movie by Mme. Duras is exquisite; I have seen it a quite long time ago, more than 6 yrs ago. Its leading actress, Mme. Seyrig, is certainly exquisite.

It's incredible how people dare to write things like this: " Look, some film has got to the be worst ever. I suggest it may be India Song."... And this is just the beginning! Some viewers (but did he SEE anything???) think that their lack of emotion or thinking is an automatic rule for everyone on earth. I don't care if A, B, or C doesn't recognize Marguerite Duras as one of the great experimenters of all the history of movie making. But I care about the fact that IMDb gives so much evidence to words of pure indifference to the cinema that tries to discuss the obvious ways of representing the world. Why the evidence to a commentary that is only a childish protest of someone who thinks the world ends in his own state of boredom?

I was completely hypnotized and paralyzed while seeing this film. The first time I saw it, I was so deeply moved that I couldn't even move my fingers, let alone any other parts of my body. I sat very still and tried to breathe as quietly as possible. This film has a profound effect on my state of mind. It seems to be beyond any definitions, any explanations, any limits, any boundaries. There is nothing ordinary from the first image to the last image. Nearly every image in this movie makes my heart want to stop beating:the sunset, the shadow on the ground, the smoke lingering in the air, the ballroom, the mirror, etc. "Time" and "space" in this movie were transformed into something undescribeable. Every movement of Delphine Seyrig is sublime. Nearly every shot, scene, and detail of each scene, is full of a kind of feeling--and I hardly get this kind of feeling from other movies. I'm not even sure if I should call it "feeling." But it's full of "something" very strong, something that I feel, but that something is very different from "feelings" I usually experience. The music is very beautiful, but it is the voice-over in this movie which brought me to the strange and unique state of consciousness, and uplift this movie to the realm of the unknown. The voice of the crazy woman in this movie somehow makes me think about the radio announcement of murderers in "Nathalie Granger." I have seen "India Song" in a cinema here four times but I still can't get enough of it. This movie is my friend's most favorite film of all time and it is one of my top ten favorites,too.