Melancholy and Displacement in India Song

I found India Song to be equal measures perplexing and intriguing; while I can’t profess to have completely understood the plot or the role of every character, I thought certain scenes in particular were very effective in generating intense feelings of both melancholy and nostalgia.

For me, the scene that ‘explained’ the most about the film’s overall message was during one of the many dances, when the woman explains what living in India is like – neither difficult nor easy, nothing changes, there is nothing to do except continue living. As they dance around the stately and palatial room, I became increasingly aware of the falseness and simulacral quality of the house the film takes place in. While these characters live in India, what they really live in is a hollowly reconstructed copy of aristocratic France, complete with draped velvet, ornate spiral staircases, foregrounded with huge, antique pianos. For me, it is this utter placelessness and falseness of their imagined surroundings that has led to India coming to represent such an abyss of meaning for these characters. What can their aspirations be in this make-believe version of France other than to perpetuate it and populate it? In this respect, while not necessarily the main message, I felt that the film made a strong comment on colonialism and the little discussed plight of the colonists themselves; ultimately, to be a colonist is to attempt to create a society exactly as it is imagined in a place that bears no real relation to that society. Ultimately, while these characters do inhabit this fake French mansion (interestingly enough, the mansion itself is actually located in Paris and not India), they are unable to feel it is reality, always undone by the stifling and overwhelming heat, constant proof that their world is not what it seems.

On top of this colonial comment, I also thought that the film was very relevant to this week’s readings on mourning, melancholy, and desire. The filmic world of India Song is truly one drenched in melancholy. The very world of the film is drained of almost all color, appearing worn out and rusty, with reds and oranges permeating all other colors and dominating the landscape. These colors lend the environments of the film a heavy, stifling, and worn out quality. In addition to this, the characters of the film continually complain of the overwhelming and unbearable heat in the mansion. Ultimately, the mansion in India Song becomes a hugely claustrophobic and overbearing location, the perfect site for the characters in the film to play out their colonial and romantic angst and melancholy. As the title song continually plays and replays and the action on the action on the screen starts to become almost wholly repetitive with more and more of the film taking place within the same section of the main room, the film starts to achieve an air of total claustrophobia and inevitability, the story it is recounting becoming secondary to the mixed feelings of mourning and resignation brought by the formal elements of the film. The continual repetition of these motifs and elements truly drags the viewer into the heavy and melancholic world of the film until finally the films melancholy becomes the viewer’s.