Unseen voices narrate this story of the affair between the haunting Anne-Marie Stretter and the disgraced French vice-consul in Làhore. In the India of 1937, with the smell of laurels and leprosy permeating the air, the characters perform a dance of doomed love to the strains of a dying colonialism.
Originally commissioned as a play for Britain’s National Theatre,
India Song was made into a film that premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.
American Cinematographer praised it for its “imaginative use of voices creating an echo chamber effect that perpetuates the past, ” and Molly Haskell called it “Marguerite Duras’ most perfectly realized film, the most feminine film I have seen, a rarefied work of lyricism, despair, and passion, imbued with a kind of primitive emotional hunger that is all the more moving for its austere setting.”