Marguerite Duras made an auspicious move into cinema with her screenplay for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, an international sensation that even scored her an Oscar nod. Duras’s intricate script unfolds along an ever-shifting network of spatial and temporal indeterminacies, a structural technique indebted to the Nouveau Roman, or New Novel, which Alain Robbe-Grillet helped to establish. When Duras began making her own films, she continued to explore these narrative fault lines, while also boldly experimenting with film’s fundamental components: image and sound. Of the two films included in Criterion’s set, India Song pushes these tendencies the furthest, almost to their breaking point.
The opening shots of India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter are a study in opposites, and suggest that they could be considered two sides of the same coin. The former starts with a protracted shot of the sun declining in the distance, and mostly transpires over a period of several nights. The latter begins at sunrise, seemingly unfolding over the course of a single day. Though strikingly different in setting and mood, both films are ruled by the uncertainty principle, riddled with unspoken assumptions, conflicted motivations, and stifled desires.
Both films also depict the subtly malign influence of domestic spaces, with the suggestion of domestication and passive resignation, on the lives of their female protagonists. India Song largely takes place in the French embassy at Calcutta in 1937, while most of Baxter, Vera Baxter is set in a modernistic villa by the seaside. Despite their obvious dissimilarity, both locations eventually come to resemble nothing so much as haunted houses. If it seems unusual to align such radically experimental films with genre cinema, take note of the mention, late in Baxter, Vera Baxter, of the local tradition of witchy women who commune with nature.
India Song establishes its uncanny aura by using a chorus of voices to comment on its events. The characters never visibly deliver their lines as they wander slowly and impassively on screen like revenants. In fact, they bear more than a passing resemblance to the spectral inhabitants of the hotel in Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, which was penned by Robbe-Grillet.
One of the first things that the viewer learns from two of the female voices has to do with the ambassador’s wife, Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), long dead by her own hand and buried in the nearby English cemetery. So when the embassy’s domestic (Claude Juan) repeatedly lights a stick of incense placed near her framed portrait, it comes to resemble an elegiac ritual—a sort of memento mori. And the crumbling exterior of the embassy building further emphasizes the film’s brooding sense of temporal dislocation.
The emotional core of India Song exists between Anne-Marie, who’s allowed, even encouraged, by her husband to take multiple lovers, and the French consul in Lahore (Michael Lonsdale), who’s been recently relieved from his post owing to the seemingly mad act of firing into the ranks of leprous beggars below his window. The brief encounter between these souls consists of an impassioned attempt at persuasion (again like Last Year in Marienbad) by the consul.
He tries to convince Anne-Marie that they’re united by their mutual loneliness and alienation, suffering from the same affliction, which is referred to on several occasions as “leprosy of the heart.” The sound of the consul’s agonized screams resounding in the distance after Anne-Marie’s rejection is affectively amplified when you learn that Lonsdale had a lifelong, unrequited love for Seyrig, and here was his singular chance to give it voice.
With its sundrenched seaside locations and use of direct sound, Baxter, Vera Baxter might seem like a more conventional film. But it’s just as haunted by the vexing specter of indeterminacy lurking below the surface of apparent meanings and ostensible intentions. As a result, every line of Duras’s spare dialogue must be parsed with the kind of clinical detachment signaled by the film’s title, which privileges the “official,” married name of its lead (Claudine Gabay).
On a more atavistic level, there are those aforementioned beliefs in the sort of sorcery that holds that to know an entity’s name is to exercise a degree of magical control over its bearer. Calling out a name is quite literally an incantation. Witness the fact that throughout the film the other characters always refer to Vera Baxter by both her first and last names.
After much discussion about whether or not Vera Baxter has taken possession (in several possible senses) of the beachfront villa that her never seen but not unheard husband has rented for her, the film ends with the unsettling insinuation that she may have committed suicide on the premises sometime in the recent past. One possible implication is that her last interlocutor—listed in the credits as “the unknown” (Delphine Seyrig)—may be some sort of psychopomp there to conduct her into the otherworld. Intriguingly, India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter refuse to visualize the violence of their narratives, resolutely keeping their respective deaths by suicide offscreen, thus affirming the seductive art of suggestion.
Image/Sound
Both films (each on its own Blu-ray disc) are presented in striking new 2K digital restorations supervised by India Song cinematographer Bruno Nuytten. Shot on 16mm with a 1.37:1 OAR, India Song’s image leans toward the green overall, yet displays some strong flashes of primary color like the deep red of Delphine Seyrig’s Cerruti dress. Framed in 1.66:1 and filmed on 35mm, Baxter, Vera Baxter showcases cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s luminous juxtaposition of creamy, muted domestic spaces and the bold greens and blues of the woods and beaches along France’s Atlantic coast. Both India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter feature a French LPCM mono track. There’s also an English-language dub of India Song to which both Seyrig and Michael Lonsdale contributed their own rather distinctive voices. The LPCM tracks sound full and rich, keeping the flavorful scores by composer Carlos d’Alessio front and center.
Extras
Criterion doesn’t offer an overwhelming number of bonus materials. Given the allusive, experimental nature of these films, a couple of in-depth commentary tracks would have been helpful, but what’s here is still quite interesting and insightful. A 2020 program on the making of the film, titled, “Shooting India Song: A Story in Four Voices,” features talking-head contributions from assistant director Benoît Jacquot, cinematographer Bruno Nuytten, script supervisor Genevieve Dufour, and producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, who offer a thoroughgoing reminiscence of their experiences making the film. Marguerite as She Was is a fascinating and intimate hour-long portrait of Marguerite Duras that hopscotches across the decades to provide snippets of interview as well as more domestic material. In an excerpt from a 1977 documentary, Seyrig discusses her working relationship with Duras over the years. Also from 1977, there’s a short interview with Duras in which she expands on the notion of the witchy woman that informs Baxter, Vera Baxter. Finally, there’s an illustrated booklet with an essay by Ivone Margulies that does an excellent job of situating these films within Duras’s larger body of work.
Overall
Gorgeously lensed and hauntingly elusive, these two films by Marguerite Duras get reliably strong transfers and a slender yet solid set of supplements from Criterion.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
