[In "India Song," Marguerite Duras's] most perfectly realized film, the present is in a constant state of deliquescence. As in her previous films, the voices function as an echo chamber whereby the past is imprinted and repeated to infinity….

The fact that it is possible to enjoy [the] characters, to come under the film's spell, and not see it as a parable about the imminent demise of the bourgeoisie is perhaps as much a function of Duras's ambivalence as the audience's, and a triumph of style and an instinctive woman's empathy over strict ideology….

"India Song" is the most feminine film I have ever seen. This is not just in the obvious details of decor, the gauzy, languid atmosphere, the feeling for textures and color and romantic lighting, but in the overwhelming sensual importance granted such things in the way life-and-love is remembered, the crucial importance of setting, of mise-en-scene, in the female memory. As women look for "total" experiences, so experiences remembered become total, decor merges with the romantic songs and suicidal sadness of a living for love that is at once destitute, debilitating, and intense, There is in the whole a pervasive sensuality, a kind of active, or enveloping, passivity that is feminine in feeling, being at odds with the masculine need to "make something happen."

The techniques and concerns of Duras's previous films are fused into a rarefied work of lyricism, despair, and passion….

What raises this Duras above the others for me is not a sudden quickening of narrative pace: it is fully as static as "La Femme du Gange" ["Woman of the Ganges"]. Silence remains the dominant figure of speech, emptiness the controlling figure of style, boredom the essential mood. Together they are the coordinates of a vacuum that, like the impinging revolution in "Destroy She Said," threatens to envelop and silence forever this threadbare civilization. Yet how elegant are these last few threads, and how exquisitely, how seductively Duras has rendered them…. It is [an] eruption of passion along with the score … that gives "India Song" an emotional immediacy Duras's other films have lacked. However ironically the song (which would fall under Noel Coward's heading of 'cheap music') was intended, it imbues the film with a kind of primitive emotional hunger that is all the more moving for its austere setting.

I am sure that Duras's apologists will manage to defend the film on structural or political grounds that ignore (in embarrassment?) the emotional pull, and the importance of the stars themselves. But Duras is not an abstract avant-garde filmmaker, she falls somewhere between narrative and non-narrative film…. (p. 134)