Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert

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Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert( Her names Venise in deserted Calcutta) is a french film directed by Magueritte Duras in 1976. Despite the director had never been to India, she imagined and depicted India for a longer plan during all her life. Calcutta in Duras's depiction is a place full of hidden sorrow under a veil of joyness and charming. Some critics opine this film "is hailed as an experimental feminist text that simultaneously critiques colonial culture, women's status in society, and representations of the female body. Feminist critics make much of the fact that all of the voices in the play/film are disembodied and that the characters are seen as physical bodies devoid of direct dialogue."

Duras demonstrates that the disease and suffering of the Indians symbolically infects the Europeans as well. Thus, she asserts: One of the external signs of the fissuring of the seemingly watertight compartmentalized colonial society is the deep sense of malaise and maladjustment which is wearing out its white inhabitants. In spite of the vast paraphernalia of protective artifices the Europeans find their presence in the colony quite intolerable.

A deeply sensitive introspection around the themes of presence and absence, memories, life, love, death and permanence. Not a movie to see, but sensations to live. Something about what can't be said or show. If you don't like it, your are only half living. If you like it, you are already half dead. A unique magical object. Sad and beautiful. Pure poetry.