Next up at #146, we have this movie that is theoretically about the wife of a French diplomat in India, where she has various affairs that culminate in a particularly doomed one.

I say “theoretically” because it barely takes its nominal premise seriously. The movie is filmed in France and it makes no particular effort to even try to look like India (the director explicitly didn’t want to even see any pictures of India because she wanted it to be more imaginative).

And as for anyone’s actions… well, the movie barely has action. Every scene is filmed with people (mostly) standing still, or (occasionally) moving languidly and slowly. There’s no straight dialogue, there’s only voiceover, which is mixed between outright third-party narration and quasi-dialogue. The affairs are described in that narration, but the closest we come to seeing anything happen is people lying around in languid semi-undress.

But of course, that’s genuinely not what the movie is about. What it’s really about is the sense of being in exile, with fake-India as just a blank canvas on which to paint the idea of not-France. And the characters’ dissolute behavior is meant to kind of show the breakdown in the sense of self that comes with that exile (with one character in particular having absolutely broken). It’s like a much less kinetic Apocalypse Now in a lot of ways.

And so I think it’s successful in what it’s trying to do. It establishes that mood effectively — it makes you feel the enervating torpor that it’s trying to evoke, and the sense that things are falling apart. But… it’s still a little weird to make a movie that’s nominally about India, but where India doesn’t even make an appearance, and it’s just all about the French.