India Song

Ah, this is so much more satisfying than Nathalie Granger! I was not prepared to like it quite so much, or at least not in quite this way. It touched the same nerve a very select and special group of films have: Marienbad, Red Desert, Zerkalo, period; it’s lightweight compared to those, not as rapturous or intense, but it made my mind work in the same way.

From the start it was a league above Granger, and I was always going to give it a high mark, but still for the first twenty minutes or so I was inclined to cut it down on a couple issues: the mannered and literary narration for one, which I expect was lifted straight from Duras’ novel, in a sort of vain attachment to her words that she should have relinquished for the cinema. And at first her range of static to slowly panning camerawork frustrated me: does her visual content have any meaning? is there any art in this?

Twenty minutes, and those concerns were gone, replaced not just with acclimation to her style but actual jaw-dropping admiration for her ingenuity. The narration — but it’s hard to call it that: it is more a chorus of disembodied voices, some questioning and criticizing the on-camera characters, some standing in for the evidently unspoken words of those characters — anyway, her use of it reinforces the images and themes wonderfully. Aside from the chorus, this is essentially a silent film; the characters do not speak, and the way she does this supports their isolation and their split and doubled selves (I’ll get to that, if I can make sense of it). And if it preserves her text, all the better; after all, her words served Hiroshima well enough!

As to her visual style: it is deceptively simple and actually brilliant. She sets up a scene and puts her actors in poses; languidly, gradually compounding in meaning, the composition modulates, positions shift, figures enter and leave the frame. Consider this sequence:

And complex meanings exist within and outside the frame. Much of the action takes place in a room with a mirror that runs from floor to ceiling. At first, and at times, it is not apparent one is watching a mirror image of reality, and the image and the reality carry very different implications: if Anne-Marie dances with one man while another appears to be gazing away from them, unconcerned, indifferent, one realizes he is actually staring directly at them, with a whole different sort of emotion. A character departs the reality-frame on the right, only to reenter the mirror-frame on the left to depart again. And when the composition shows the mirror image only, and not also the real person casting the reflection, it doesn’t appear a mirror at all, but rather gives the illusion of an arch, a gateway.

The mirror images are, of course, like reality, but in Duras’ compositions they are at their most realistic turned a degree from the real-image, displaced; at other times, the reflections are almost absurd in their contrast to the real. Characters move through spaces, but nothing happens. “One could say almost nothing is possible in India,” a disembodied voice reflects; these are isolated, unfulfilled, abstracted people. The mirror images abstract: they double and split the people they recreate, diffusing their identities. The wordlessness, their thoughts swirling outside the scene, further removes body from mind, thought, self. Bodies move through space, but nothing happens, nothing can happen, and the idle stasis is portentous, deadening. Eventually everything comes round to the beginning: images, ideas, words repeat over and over. Nothing changes. They are trapped, doubled, undefined, images, reflections…

Well I could go on for hours without making a sensible case of it. This is certainly one of those films, sets me off this way…

Not much more I can say, then, except another breathless exaltation of Seyrig: few actors have the kind of power to impact the final product in the way she does. I don’t just mean she acts well. Many actors breathe life into their parts, become their parts, take their parts far above the quality of an overall film; no, Seyrig… I don’t know how to put it exactly. There is something in her vague pliability that makes her as fundamental as the film stock itself. She is a canvas: but breathing, creative. I want to explain what I mean, but it’ll take more thought. Only that Dielman would not have worked so well with anyone else, and neither would India Song. What a strange, mysterious creature she is: and bizarre… between Dielman, India Song, Accident, Marienbad: is she our last silent actor? Is not that strange? Oh yes, she mystifies me…