India Song

Book excerpt: 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.”