DIRECTOR/SCREENPLAY: Marguerite Duras
PRODUCER: Stephane Tchalgadileff
PRODUCTION CO: Sunchild Productions, Les Films Armorial 
PHOTOGRAPHY: Bruno Nuytten
EDITOR: Solange Leprince
MUSIC: Carlos d'Alessio
WITH: Delphine Seyrig (Anne-Marie Stretter), Michael Lonsdale (Vice-consul in Lahore), Mathieu Carrière (Attaché to the German ambassador), Claude Mann (Michael Richardson), Vernon Dobtcheff (Georges Crawn), Didier Flamand (Young guest), Claude Juan (Servant)

​FESTIVALS: New York, Cannes, Toronto

REVIEWS

“Widely considered writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras’s greatest film, India Song is ravishingly beautiful, disturbing, and complexly unresolved by design. Draped in Cerruti 1881, Delphine Seyrig plays the stunning, statuesque Anne-Marie Stretter, the promiscuous, unhappy wife of the French ambassador of India in the 1930s. A former pianist who listlessly lies around in the tropical heat, she is bored with the diplomatic suitors who surround her. Like ghosts, they haunt the French ambassador’s lavish, decaying mansion in Calcutta, a gilded cage of privilege that protects them from the poor and diseased near the Ganges. As sounds of a beggar can be heard from outside, disembodied female and male voices comment on the images, not only like a chorus, but also serving the characters’ thoughts and asynchronous dialogue.

The film’s radical sound-image construction is accompanied by Carlos D’Alessio’s hypnotic, tango-inflected music, which attends the near-ritualistic proceedings. Like all of Duras’s work, the film reflects her preoccupation with colonial guilt (having grown up in French Indochina, now Vietnam) and amour fou, here embodied by the dishonoured Vice-Consul of Lahore (Michael Lonsdale), who is madly in love with the elusive Stretter. Seyrig, divine as usual and still emanating intelligence despite her mannered listlessness (think Vogue Italia), is in a sort of countershot to her character in Marienbad – in command of the formalist orchestration while doing next to nothing.”

– Andrea Picard, TIFF Cinematheque

“Spare, elegant, disjunctive, initially annoying and ultimately drop-dead beautiful, Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975) was one of the great European art films of the post-art-film era.”

– J Hoberman, NY Times 

The cinematic sorcery of Marguerite Duras – Ella Slater, Elephant 
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FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Queenstown 
Tuesday, 06 August, 8.00pm

New Plymouth  
Wednesday, 14 August, 6.00pm​

Auckland 
Monday, 02 September, 6:15pm

​​Dunedin  
Wednesday, 11 September, 7.30pm

Whanganui
Monday, 23 September, 7.00pm

Palmerston North
Wednesday, 30 October, 6.00pm
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French Connections is presented in
​co-operation with the Institut Français and the Embassy of France