Post 8. India Song

India song is a poetically engaging view of a country seeping into the modern age, against the backdrop of a mystical love story. The composition of the film and its characters is essential to the audience’s perception and response to the melancholic undertones of the imagery and music. The actual song ‘India Song’ hauntingly accompanies the plot of the film, winding and full of ‘mirror’s, both physical and metaphorical. It is as if the individuals are searching for their other ‘selves,’ searching for compassion, love, and really in the most basic of terms, a human proximity. The subtext of the film is that of a young Indian girl, who’s story is interjected throughout the film, the harkening of her fate in which she is cast out of her home, and looks to ‘get lost,’ ultimately letting her baby die. In this way the film is a sad, somewhat emotional and incredibly desolate journey, told through the face of one woman and the life-journey of another. The colours of the film, the glowing pretence of an ‘Indian summer’ is ironically a false one; after researching the film after the screening I was perplexed to find out that the entire film was shot just outside Paris. In this way it is my belief that falsity, of emotions and perceptions and the human persona illuminated in the hot, damp and sensual location is thus a crucially engrained part of the film. Several scenes cling to my memory purely for their composition and context, that of the woman, lying on the ground as if dead, breast exposed, as though she were a corpse. The entire film is paradox, for example ‘India is not difficult but it is not easy’ and in this way I came to the belief that the film is a comment on an incredibly divided society, divided simultaneously between the past and the present. The mystical and dream-like reds and oranges create a perception that time goes unnoticed, as the characters drift from place to place, as though, again, searching.