India Song

Duras’s favorite collaborator Delphine Seyrig (“the greatest actress in France and possibly in the entire world”) is hypnotic as Anne-Marie, the wife of a disgraced French diplomat (Michael Lonsdale), suffering from “leprosy of the soul” or what might be more chicly termed ennui. Through a mélange of off-screen gossip (again nearly all sound is nonsynchronous), we learn of Anne-Marie’s scandalous conduct in 1930s India and her eventual fate, engendered by boredom, colonial guilt, and a string of meaningless affairs. Duras renders her study of mental torment in elaborate style (Dave Kehr calls her “the Busby Berkeley of structuralism”), and Bruno Nuytten’s cinematography captures the glittering emptiness of life in a gilded cage—the feeling that privilege can be its own form of illness.