Nocturne Indien

The Alliance Francaise consistently brings me nice surprises. A few weeks ago, it screened a gorgeous print of Nocturne Indien, an elusive and stirringly beautiful film little seen outside France. Helmed by Alain Corneau, whose more popular work Tous Les Matins du Monde was screened earlier last month at the AF, Nocturne Indien is even more mysterious and unfathomable than its already dense and strange successor.

Much of the film is built around a self-reflexive wisp of a plot that alternately disappears, bends and refracts through the exotic Indian landscape that our European protagonist finds himself lost in. We follow him as he arrives in the tatters of Bombay city, following the trail of a friend that leads him deeper into the rural heart of India. The plot comes alive when he meets an array of colorful characters along the way, yet when our attention is turned onto the premise, we become unsure if he is only following shadows, if his friend even existed in the first place, if his friend was not actually his own shadow.

The film forgoes plot and character to become what critics lazily call 'tone poem' or 'mood piece' – it leads us into circles and more concentric circles, doubling onto itself and beginning again where one left off (as all good mysteries should be, I think). The protagonist himself is mysterious – he is a Portuguese man who speaks perfect English, played by a French actor complete with French accent – and is never allowed to reveal much about himself. And with the help of Schubert's sensual String Quartet in C Major, the loose script is all the better for the director to jig over his preoccupations and weave its textures like shades of smooth exotic carpets.

But Nocturne Indien is not a film that bears much logical scrutiny. It is a dream, a fantasy of an ancient spiritual India by a European director (to call it exoticized is right, but rather meaningless). Even though it was shot entirely on location, it never felt like it had reached India's shores, just as its plot begins from a concrete point and slowly disintegrates into a lushly illustrated illusion. Quoting Fernando Pessoa and Herman Hesse, it is apparent who the film identifies with – the dreamers: Pessoa, who yearned his life away, traveling the world in fantasies and thoughts but never stepping foot on the concrete soil of reality; Hesse, who was physically in Europe when he wrote his metaphorical masterpiece of (Western-inflected) Buddhism, Siddhartha.

The film exists in short bursts of wordless cinematic grace, hardly describable in logically formed sentences. After all, cinema helps us find the words we've always wanted to say but couldn't. There is a miraculous scene in which the camera first wanders around India as the protagonist imagines it in his mind, showing the empty places without people. Then, moments later, as the protagonist wonders through these places, we see the exact same shots this time with the protagonist in frame. The scenery is now given a purpose, bound to character and plot, wrenched from our imagination as it has with the protagonist, for whom the places have now 'died,' seeing it in concrete reality. There's always such a minute sense of disappointment when we see in real life all the things we have previously imagined, as if reality took away something that's preciously ours– our images, our imagination.

Like the elaborate tracking shots of empty hallways in Ozu's Early Summer, the camera in Nocturne Indien acts as if with its own spirituality – with the ability to travel beyond the characters, beyond our physical reality, to show us images from a phantom land; the camera seems to represent something transcendental (time?) that exists outside of us. It brings us that phantom land on a big white screen (because we become like that protagonist, finally visiting the places that were once the images in our imagination – bringing about the death of the images), but yet, because of the wonderful paradox that is cinema, it allows us to see a reality without physically stepping foot into it. Seeing reality as if in a dream, we are able to reclaim the images as ours, cradling and nursing them as our new shared images, our common illusion (and the images, dwelling in our minds like spirits mixed in a heady cocktail, obtain rebirth). And the miraculous thing about it is, reality or not, they end up being part of our memories anyway, shared with strangers in the same room whose lives connect and share in that same moment.

But a film like Nocturne Indien can never bear to complete itself (and let itself die). The ending doesn't make sense at all except in a logic of its own, and Jean-Hugues Anglade's expression at the end makes it one of the most enigmatic and unforgettable endings in all of cinema, reminiscent of Greta Garbo's face in the famous ending of Queen Christina. And a film that ends without punctuation (not even ellipses) is like Kafka's greatest novels – they never die, sullied by a point, message or even an idea. Like a thought, half-formed, on the tip of the tongue waiting to be uttered – the stage where everything, even love, is at its most bewitching, innocent and perfect.