Nocturne indien (1989) - film review

Rossignol, a young Frenchman, arrives in Bombay to search for a missing friend, Xavier.   From the prostitute who wrote to him, Rossignol learns that his friend fell ill about a year ago, shortly before his disappearance.  Rossignol’s quest takes him to Madras and then Goa, and at various stages of his search he has some insightful exchanges with the locals.  But will he ever find what he is looking for...?

After a series of what are now regarded as classic French thrillers, including Police Python 357 (1976) and Le Choix des armes (1981), director Alain Corneau made an unexpected change of tack in the mid-1980s, and his subsequent films show a much wider diversity than anyone could have predicted.  The most striking departure was probably Nocturne indien, a curious (typically French) kind of road movie in which a young man (Jean-Hugues Anglade) goes on a search for his identity under the pretext of looking for a lost friend. The film is a faithful adaptation of the novel by Antonio Tabucchi.

To anyone familiar with Corneau’s earlier films, the style of Nocturne indien is just as surprising as its subject matter.  The tone and texture of the film imbue it with a mood that is sombre, intimate and reflective, more characteristic of Eric Rohmer, Michel Deville or Jean-Luc Godard than Alain Corneau.  The dawdling pace and static, deeply sensual photography capture some of the strangeness, to a Westerner, of life in India, with its extremes of climate, natural beauty, and acute human suffering.   Whilst the film has great artistic merit, it does get a little caught up in its cleverness.  The abundance of arcane cultural references amid some complex philosophical discussions gives the film an overly intellectual feel, which to some extent dilutes the poetry and raw humanity which comes from Anglade’s arresting performance and the poignant images of everyday life in India.

© James Travers 2007

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