India Song (1975) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Marguerite Duras
Writers: Marguerite Duras
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Michael Lonsdale, Mathieu Carrière

Marguerite Duras’s most celebrated work is a mesmerizing, almost incantatory experience with few stylistic precedents in the history of cinema. Within the insular walls of a lavish, decaying embassy in 1930s India, the French ambassador’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) staves off ennui through affairs with multiple men—with the overpowering torpor broken only by a startling eruption of madness. Setting her evocatively decadent visuals to a desynchronized chorus of disembodied voices that comment on and counterpoint the action, Duras creates a haunted-house movie unlike any other.

Two Films by Marguerite Duras:
Marguerite Duras had already established herself as one of the major figures of postwar French literature when she launched an equally fascinating and unclassifiable career in cinema, translating her elliptical, experimental style to the screen through an unprecedented fusion of hypnotic, highly stylized imagery and radically disjunctive sound. Boldly reimagining the possibilities of dialogue, music, silence, and architectural space, the tantalizing, sphinxlike evocations of soul-deep female malaise India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter embody Duras’s singular multisensory approach, with each opening up new spaces for the expression of women’s interior worlds.

Extras:
- 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Newly discovered alternate English-language audio track, directed by Marguerite Duras
- Program from 2020 on the making of the film, featuring interviews with the cast and crew
- Excerpt from a 1977 documentary on actor Delphine Seyrig
- New English subtitle translation




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