Baxter, Vera Baxter

Baxter, Vera Baxter
Baxter, Vera Baxter
Directed by	Marguerite Duras
Written by	Marguerite Duras
Produced by	Stéphane Tchalgadjieff ; Danièle Gégauff
Starring	Claudine Gabay ; Delphine Seyrig ; Gérard Depardieu
Cinematography	Sacha Vierny
Music by	Carlos d'Alessio
Production; companies	Institut National de l'Audiovisuel ; Sunchild Productions
Distributed by	Roissy Films
Release date	1977
Running time	95 minutes
Country	France
Language	French

Baxter, Vera Baxter is a 1977 French film directed by Marguerite Duras, based on her then-unpublished novel Vera Baxter ou les Plages de l'Atlantique.

Plot and interpretation edit

The film opens with Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay) posing. In the next scene we are inside the bar of a hotel and hear the clerk respond to an inquiring woman about the luxurious seaside house and Vera Baxter. There’s also a man named Cayre (Gérard Depardieu) present, who has failed to get in touch with Vera Baxter. We see Vera again in a grande rental villa. She receives two visitors (Noëlle Châtelet and Delphine Seyrig), and we hear her story about her marriage from these conversations.

The film is a "hypnotically unsettling journey into one woman’s existential emptiness. Ensconced in a sprawling rental villa, the world-weary Vera Baxter (Gabay) receives visits from two women, including a mysterious stranger (Seyrig) to whom she recounts a shocking story about her marriage, the way she lives, and the reasons for her malaise." Vera Baxter is "a harsh take on bourgeois conformity and prostitution," or, in Duras’s words, “an infernal circuit that shuttles her from the love of her children to her conjugal duties.”^[1]^[2]