La Femme du Gange is the first film in Marguerite Duras’s ‘Indian Cycle’: three films (with India Song and Son nom de Vénise dans Calcutta désert) that she made after a trio of books she wrote between 1964 and 1971: all set in the mythical “S. Thala” – a coastal town she invented as a substitute for the Indochina of her childhood – and preoccupied with the same story of “a love paralysed at the height of passion.” But, as the grey skies and her characters’ fur coats attest, the film was shot in the colder climate of Trouville, Normandy: to which Duras frequently escaped to write (and where she made many of her late-career films).
 
S. Thala displays little sign of life. Two men and two women, said to have lost their memories, drift along vast sands, watching as a traveller (Duras’s former husband, Dionys Mascolo) arrives (or rather, returns). We learn from the two disembodied women’s voices (including that of Françoise Lebrun) that he has arrived there to take his own life, haunted by an affair he had with a married woman decades previously. But, in a grand, empty hotel, the woman reappears as a spectral presence. 
 
La Femme du Gange is an exploration of love, memory and the eternity of desire. But not just in the name of the traveller and the object of his love. Indeed, Duras’s intention was to make a film in which “the past, relieved, uncluttered from the accident of personal biography” would be “private and collective at the same time”

Preceded by Marin Karmitz’s Nuit noire, Calcutta (1964), presented in a new restoration:

‘Nuit noire, Calcutta was originally commissioned by a pharmaceutical company that was about to launch a drug meant to treat alcoholism. After trying and failing to make a documentary on the subject, I thought of Marguerite, whom I knew to have experienced problems with alcohol. As she had just come out of rehab, she was keen to talk about it and came up with a first version of Nuit noire, Calcutta: Synopsis: An alcoholic writer, vice-consul of France in Calcutta, is reduced to impotence…’ –Marin Karmitz