Two other voices emanating from the offscreen space are crucial. The narrative-the backstory, the description of the actions and relationships of the characters-is conveyed by some half-dozen offscreen voices, their fragmentary speculations, mixed occasionally with bits of dialogue spoken asynchronously by the main characters (the dark, throaty timbre of Seyrig’s voice is unmistakable), an undercurrent of unseen party guests Carlos D’Alessio’s great score is punctuated by the repeated melody of the “India Song Blues” and bits of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, a Duras signature. There is the image, and then there is the sound track, its tonalities as subtle and rich as the color and play of light on the screen. No one would be surprised to learn that it was shot on a set constructed in a crumbling mansion near Paris. India Song puts all the senses on high alert, and yet it is not in any sense realism. The image created by Duras and cinematographer Bruno Nuytten is at once ghostly and eroticized, so delicately colored that it seems hand-tinted, and the closeness of the air, weighted by the insufferable heat, is palpable. Time folds in on itself in India Song, and space is fractured by the huge mirror that nearly covers one wall so that the reflection of the room is a constant it is always different, however, from the framing of the room by the camera, whether still or moving.
A memory piece that calls up the dead, its heroine, Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), dances with her lover, Michael Richardson (Claude Mann), in the ballroom of the French Embassy in Calcutta, where her memorial-a photograph, a stick of burning incense, some flowers-is already arranged on the piano.
Instead, begin with India Song, an evocation of colonialist India in the 1930s-1937, to be precise, the year before the war would change everything. The only violence we see is a close-up of a piano teacher’s hands cruelly gripping those of her pupil. The danger remains offscreen, lurking perhaps in the overgrown garden or behind a half-opened door inside the comfortable but neglected house-the lamplight soft, the paint peeling from the walls. If you’ve never seen any of them, do not start with her stilted early feature Destroy, She Said (1969) or even with Nathalie Granger, widely regarded as her most accessible, perhaps because its cast includes a charming black cat, a young girl who may or may not be exceptionally disposed toward violence, a restless Jeanne Moreau who seems not to know what she’s doing in this strange movie, and Gérard Depardieu as a confused washing-machine salesman (one of his first screen roles), all of them in imminent danger, at least according to news broadcasts, from a pair of teenage killers roaming the countryside. These are rare objects-only a few of the films Duras directed exist as subtitled prints, and only one of them, Nathalie Granger (1972), is currently available on DVD.
FRAGMENTATION THE LOVER DURAS SERIES
The monthlong program “In the Words of Marguerite Duras”-presented by Anthology Film Archives, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, the French Embassy, and the French Institute Alliance Français-concludes with a series of films (March 12–18) at Anthology: seven features and two shorts projected in 35-mm prints with English subtitles. Stein, and significant for her absence from the films (Lacan wrote about her name and her “ravishing”)-is to realize that they never left my mind. Stein, present only in the novel named for her, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Merely to reencounter the names-Anne-Marie Stretter Michael Richardson the Vice-Consul from Lahore Aurelia Steiner Lol V. They are characters in a personal mythology of longing and loss, of the history of colonialism and the failure of all political programs and ideologies. To revisit her films is to be again overwhelmed by her languid femmes fatales, her wandering madwomen, her lovesick outsiders, everyone in exile whatever their gender.
It should have been among the first five.ĭuras’s subject is primal-eros and death her fragmented, elliptical narratives, whether fact or fiction, are located in the quicksand of the psyche. When I complied with the ridiculous ritual of drawing up for various publications lists of the greatest films of the twentieth century, her masterpiece, India Song (1975), did not appear. I FELL HARD for the films, novels, plays, and essays of Marguerite Duras roughly thirty years ago and then spent the decades between then and now resisting the sensuous beauty of their imagery, the tough-minded, spare elegance of their prose, and their rigorous morality. Right: Marguerite Duras, India Song, 1975, color film in 35 mm, 120 minutes. Left: Marguerite Duras, Destroy, She Said, 1969, still from a black-and-white film in 35 mm, 100 minutes.
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