Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Janis One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

ReganRebecca If you're looking for a typical movie India Song is definitely not for you. The highly experimental movie is both long and smashes a lot of the rules for conventional cinema. It teaches YOU how to watch IT. The plot, such as it is, is about the wife of a French Ambassador living in Calcutta. Bored she engages in a series of love affairs. This information is provided completely in narration that plays over a series of ghost like images in which we see the ambassador's wife dance and walk and flirt with a handful of other people in a mostly empty and abandoned looking mansion. It's essentially a ghost story. I have nothing against slow films or unconventional ones but this simply wasn't for me. Delphine Seyrig acts out the part of Anne- Marie Stretter, the wife, but watching her I was reminded of that OTHER famous movie she did in 1975, also experimental and unconventional and also directed by a woman who was a cinematic powerhouse: Chantal Akerman. In terms of plot there's not a lot to tie Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielmann to Marguerite Duras' India Song, but the two feature a similar style of long shots and repetition. That said I find Jeanne Dielmann by far the easier of the two to watch. While that movie is hypnotizing and entrancing Duras' movie feels stale, like a book of hers that was never quite able to come to fruition. A movie that perhaps only Duras devotees or Seyrig fans will love.

Rebecca I'm not sure what drug one would have to be on to enjoy this film... but it's complete poo if you're sober. I admit that I liked the music and the main character's dress (a lot), but otherwise it was a waste of a beautiful Miami Sunday afternoon. The images were dark and the characters interchangeable. The story was unclear and uninteresting. I feel sorry for the film school guy who introduced it who probably had to watch it several times and try to make it sound interesting. I was crossing my fingers throughout the film, hoping that it wouldn't be a full two hours... but it was. Two hours of watching people look at themselves in the mirror and dance slowly in circles. Two hours of confusing and pointless off screen dialog (I never saw a lip move on screen). Two hours of strange noises and dark images. TWO WHOLE HOURS of absolutely nothing.

bebere99 I felt as though the two hours I spent watching this film may have been better served by perhaps going to the local used bookstore and looking for old fashion magazines and Halston ads. Or perhaps by watching paint dry. Those two employments would have at least engaged my mind a bit more than "India Song." The most frustrating part of sitting through this was that I could see what moods/atmospheres were trying to be created and the notion of these could have been interesting if they had been fleshed out more. Instead, what happened was a presentation of an incoherent, silly chain of nonevents - with the same scenes rehashed over and over to beat some sort of point into our senses.I was loathe to devote more time to this film by writing any sort of review, except to perhaps warn other folks against this waste of time.

AnderD Imagine watching a slide show where the projector lingers on every slide long enough for you to completely memorize it three times over. Now imagine that the images in the slide show consist entirely of mundane scenes – a small park; and empty tennis court; a piano. Now imagine that the people running the slide show are having a frustratingly slow, semi-lucid conversation about events that only occasionally relate to the slides they're showing you. Great – you've just imagined the entirety of the film `India Song.'The film is an agonizingly slow montage of images that do little except to simply scream out `Look at me! I am PROFOUND!!' with such blatant self-importance that the images themselves and the movie as a whole are rendered not merely bereft of profundity, but COMICALLY bereft of profundity. The visuals could easily have been replaced by a series of static images as described above, since it is so rare that there are actually people on screen, and even when they are, the people actually move only slightly more often than the furniture. They never speak or interact in any meaningful way – they just stand there looking at each other, and occasionally crying. The most energetic moment in the entire first hour of the film is when three people walk across a parking lot in slow motion. In fact, the visuals could easily have been left out entirely, as the story is told completely through narration. The story is about a woman who hates India because it's hot, and hates people don't hate India because it's hot (this point is covered several times). It is also about a man who feels that he is entitled to sleep with the aforementioned woman, since she will sleep with anyone who asks her to, but he doesn't get to sleep with her simply because he never asks, and he's very upset about this. So he stares at her as a single tear runs profoundly down his cheek. Later on, he stares at his bicycle, as a single tear runs profoundly down his cheek. Actually, you don't get to see the single tear running profoundly down his cheek when he's staring at his bicycle, but you know it's there anyway, just because that's the sort of film this is.At best, the narration becomes background hum, serving as a perfect compliment to the coma-inducing visuals. Simply staying conscious through the entirety of this film would require a supreme act of determination. To watch it and actually come away with a serious and meaningful idea of what it was supposed to be about would induce the same sort of migraine as trying to read lengthy technical documents in the dark. This film is perhaps the greatest monument of pseudo-artistic pretension that man will ever know.