India Song

Set in late-1930s Calcutta but mostly filmed in France, India Song draws taps into Marguerite Duras’s personal experience growing up in French-occupied Indochina. The film is loosely based on her 1965 novel, The Vice-Consul, in which a French diplomat (Lonsdale) yearns for an ambassador’s bored, unfaithful wife (Seyrig). Swirling sex, ennui, and colonial guilt together into a hypnotic, musical ritual, Duras creates “one of the great European art films of the post-art-film era” (The New York Times).