A Mesmerizing ‘India Song,’ Pulpy and Austere

Now streaming, Marguerite Duras’s hypnotic hothouse flower is as maddeningly beautiful as its star, Delphine Seyrig. 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. It followed the 1960s heyday of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Alain Resnais, Duras’s one-time collaborator (she wrote the screenplay for his first feature, “ Hiroshima, Mon Amour ”), and was in some ways more radical than their work. Like much of Duras’s work, the film, streaming through May 3 on the highly curated site, Mubi , is obliquely self-referential, drawing on earlier writings as well as her childhood in French-occupied Indochina. “India Song,” which begins with a stunning sunset, shot in what feels like real time, is nominally set in late-1930s Calcutta (but was filmed in and around a French chateau). A handful of characters — notably Delphine Seyrig as the ambassador’s unhappy wife and Michael Lonsdale as the smitten vice consul — languidly drift, pose and pivot around an old-fashioned drawing room. Incense burns, the dominant color is a velvety jade green, and the single Indian servant wears a turban. “India Song” manages to be both florid and austere and, for all its forbidding formalism, not so far from a steamy tropical romance or the B-movie exotica beloved by French surrealists. The heart of “India Song” is a masterpiece of hypnotic minimalism — a scene in which the stricken vice consul watches as the ambassador’s wife dances and flirts with several current and would-be lovers during an embassy reception. (Duras gets more mileage out of a floor-to-ceiling mirror than anyone since the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup.”) The vice consul, who someone says, “seems to be in a state of tears,” stalks the ambassador’s wife and, his advances rebuffed, makes a scene that reverberates, off-screen, for the rest of the movie.