India Song

Pretentiousness is an art form.

First I didn't hate it, nor loved it (Which seem like the two most common reactions to this.) It's tedious at time but it does succeed in capturing the boredom and purposelessness that the characters feel in a foreign country, which is enhanced by the sublime score (the best thing of this movie), and the deliberate framing (lots of mirrors) is superb.

Boring and utterly dreadful. I think we're meant to learn something about romance, but it's as if it was written by a 15 year-old girl who knows nothing about romance. There's more to being in love that just talking about being in love and how much it tortures your soul. Points for a somewhat original narrative (although it's blatantly influenced by Resnais) and some painterly images (which you will have a LONG time to study), but otherwise a real drag.

through meticulous framing and endless cycling this is perhaps the closest a film has ever come to a bach variation: the abstract architecture of its precisely calculated modulations creates a detached baroque beauty. remarkable.

Marguerite Duras appears to be on a mission to make the world's most boring, nay, most gratingly boring cinema. The incessant dialogue is there to grab your attention, just so as to fill your mind with empty words, ensuring that your thoughts cannot drift.

This is one of those odd movies for me where I haven't the slightest clue what's happening, it's as pretentious as possible, yet it somehow felt right and worked as an experience if not a film. While there are differences, the closest thing I can think of to how I reacted to it was Last Year at Marienbad. There are similarities (the voiceovers, the slow camera movements and movement of the actors, the haunting score, etc), but it's more the feel it gives you. I found it really relaxing, too.

No, this just doesn't captivate me (at least not over two hours). Let's not make talking over photographs a habit, shall we? (But man, French voiceover sure sounds very highbrow!)

Dull and empty, but beautiful. There's no denying the visual beauty of the compositions, and the slow camerawork fits in with the film's airy and distant tone. The content is rather tedious though, a bunch of narration that takes a long time to make sense, and once it does leaves you thinking "that's it?"

Delphine Seyrig is a kween

Tough, but rewarding. A peculiar mixture of sensuality and ennui that never lets the viewer get settled into its narrative.

# 425

w/ gurmes

449

our cultural identities and artistic traditions are leprous and decadent; duras is here to put them out of their misery with a film that behaves like a body in revolt against itself. the resnais comps are obvious but i kept thinking of gomes' TABU; swap in africa for india and a croc for a beggar woman, but both are ironically narrativised doomed romances suspended in a colonial bubble, and both interrogate not only the past as described but the act of representing and defining it.

"Il fait peur aux mendiants!"

Especial Centenário de Marguerite Duras: O melhor dos longas que assisti dela, até agora.

409

Really pretty, but makes a shitty watch

#433