India Song

Recounting the story of a Laotian-born beggar girl along the Ganges River who, at the age of 12, had embarked on a ten-year journey that would eventually take her from Burma to India in a desperate attempt to lose herself in the unfamiliar landscape, the elliptical narrative then abruptly shifts subjects within the threaded element of common geography as a tale of lost love is revealed between a devoted suitor named Michael Richardson (Claude Mann) who had followed his beloved, a socialite named Lola Valérie Stein, to India, only to lose her in death. Meanwhile, the sunset has been replaced by languid, fractured images of the interior of an uninhabited, elegantly appointed colonial-era home: a grand piano in an empty hall that is reinforced with the sound of a melancholic jazz piano tune; a shimmering evening ensemble laid across the floor as an off-screen narrator describes the pageantry of past soirées once hosted in the Tunisian city of Thala that had served to uncover the hidden desires of its aristocratic guests; the illumination of an ornate chandelier that is set against a conversation of an unseen light that became a harbinger for a monsoon in Calcutta; the imprecise memory of the aroma of flowers that is answered with the recollected odor of leprosy. It is within this dramlike roundelay of opulence and decadence, passion and loss, that a failed love affair plays out between the Vice-Consul of Lahore (Michael Lonsdale) and Anne Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), the wanton, neglected wife of a French administrator in Laos, as they live out their waning days of colonial privilege in the exotic, transitory paradise. –filmref.org