The last thing I felt like doing that Tuesday was see a film by Marguerite Duras. I'd been exhausted by festivaling all day. The rigors of The Truck were, I feared, more than I could take. By film's end, I found myself exhilarated, ready to dance, party, take the long walk home. Not that The Truck is any less rigorous than Duras's usual fare. Just that The Truck is such a joyous expression of rigor it leaves you energized, heady from the motion of the rolling beast….

For all her devotion to cinema, Duras has always been a novelist who makes films. The closer she is to novelistic form, the more successful her films. India Song, in which images and dialogue have no inherent one-to-one relationship, works precisely as a cinematic novel, the dissociation serving the function of an omniscient narrator commenting through style on everything which is...