ThiefHott
Too much of everything
Matcollis
This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.
Myron Clemons
A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.
Staci Frederick
Blistering performances.
pixie747
This film was a real surprise when I discovered it in the early '90s and it became one of my favorites. I enjoyed the general slow pace of the film, its dreaminess and yet its inner violence.It's exactly what I imagine tropical climates do to influence your mood .In the same vein Marguerite Duras made "L' Amant ", a semi autobiographical film. Anyway, you CAN find the video VHS-SECAM . I "stumbled" on it in a bookshop in Montpellier a couple of years ago. Here are the details :India SONG Ecrit par Marguerite Duras Entretiens Dominique Noguez Réalisation Jérôme Beaujour et Jean Mascolo Benoît Jacob Vidéo 2001
regvernon
I was taken aback at first - the complete absence of spoken dialogue from the cast was a bit unnerving - instead, the film consists of two strands, visual and aural. Visually, the film is slow, languorous and visually sensual. It is almost a 'silent' film. Aurally, the film consists of voices over, providing not so much a narrative as recollections. The voices over (not being a fluent French speaker I had to rely on sub-titles) are telling a story of events that happened in the past whilst the cast act out the events as though they are the ghosts of the buildings in which the events were played out. But there is a story - of a woman married to a French diplomat, living for the time being in Calcutta, who takes lovers to relieve the tedious boredom of social niceties (and the heat, dust and flies). This story is punctuated by one scene in which someone who has fallen in love with her makes his feelings known to her and then, betraying the norms of his society, declares his feelings and his despair, by getting emotional about it - very emotional. I was transfixed. Fortunately, I watched it on DVD having recorded it from BBC4 - so I've got it to watch again, as I shall most certainly do.
sleepsev
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.
tdemarco
Look, some film has got to the be worst ever. I suggest it may be India Song. When I saw the film in 1976 it was playing at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, a place frequented by people who care a lot about film. From about the halfway point, people were simply flooding out of the theater. My girlfriend wouldn't let us leave, but by the end, the theater was virtually empty. I kept telling people as they left that "the good part is still to come." And it was. The good part was the screen at the end that said "fin." It was the only good part. I am still annoyed by this film 24 years later. It was pointless, stupid and derivative (Marienbad, part 2). See it only if you want to spend an endless two hours learning to distinguish between merely bad and simply awful.