Baxter Vera Baxter

i didn´t enjoy this movie. i like other films with similar proposals (long shots, slow cadence, extended silences, bresson-like acting...) i accept that M.Duras had a personal way to understand the cinema, but i didn´t enjoy this movie.

Over a slow hour and a half, Duras' film unfolds in three scenes: narrative openings at a hotel bar introduce us to the absent figure of Vera Baxter, who waits in a large and empty villa she's set to rent; in the villa, Vera is visited by the former mistress of her husband, the enormously wealthy Jean Baxter; subsequently-in the film's real centre-the stranger (Delphine Seyrig) who'd heard Baxter's backstory at the hotel turns up at the house un-announced, listening in on a phone conversation between Baxter and her husband in which, with apparent, but unconvincingly finality, Vera announces that it's over, and then, in the subsequent, lengthy dialogue, insists that Baxter-who admits to frequently lying-will reveal her 'secret'. All this to slow pans around the enormous, clean, empty and arid villa, paid for with Jean's money; shots of the beach where Vera grew up; and of Thionville, the town where she now finds herself: sea, ruins and woods, emptied of people, but with an incessant, endlessly looped piece of South American music for pipe, guitar and handclaps, described by the characters as the sounds of a party from the villa nearest the sea, and in the film somewhere between diegetic and non-diegetic, real and hallucinated, ambient suggestion and maddening itch, a fly that won't go back out through the window. The revelation, if revelation it is, that Vera's one extra-marital affair was in fact set up by Jean as payment for a gambling debt reveals to a greater and more shocking extent the prison which is this bourgeois marriage-a marriage to a man, friends of her brothers, met as a teenager, enormously wealthy, but, according to Vera, a man who 'has money' rather than a 'rich man', who compulsively spends on gambling and on women in order to cover for his own lack. Vera in turn serves as accoutrement to the house (already paid for by Jean before Vera has even decided whether or not to say) as accoutrement to wife as accoutrement to husband, a financialised transaction in which sexual encounter serves as a payment for a debt between men, in which any act of freedom or defiance seems already circumscribed in a vicious circle of icy control. Vera has been sitting in the house, refusing to the answer the phone to her husband, her lover, the estate agent, contemplating suicide. But towards the film's end, the stranger tells her of the women who waited for their husbands, on holy wars or crusades, who learned to communicate with animals and forests, who were burned at the stake: one of these women was Vera Baxter, she informs her, in a flash of analysis that brings together the film's glacially, even languorously excoriating demolition of patriarchal marriage. At the film's end, the two depart for the hotel in town, not so much in sisterhood or escape, but with some slowly deepening knowledge beyond the incessant lies, tellings and re-tellings that both entrap and, perhaps, contain the seeds to understanding, itself the seed for liberation.

Although a major player in the French New Wave, the films of Marguerite Duras are, in general, not that widely known and "Baxter, Vera Baxter" is one that disappeared from view quicker than most. She wrote and directed it in 1977 with her usual collaborator Delphine Seyrig and a little-seen Gerard Depardieu heading a largely unknown cast and it plods along in typrical metronomic fashion as we are introduced to our titular heroine, (Claudine Gabay), by Depardieu who, it appears, is her current lover before meeting Vera herself as she languishes in some expensive villa regaling anyone who listens with tales of her sorry love life; Seyrig is one of the listeners.

This is the kind of art-house movie that gives art-house movies a bad name. Ponderous, pretentious and, although only ninety minutes long, feeling like an eternity in hell. It's the kind of rubbish you can see the Monty Python team sending up with dialogue so precious you may feel like switching the subtitles off altogether but even then you would still have to listen to the God-awful music. To be avoided like the worst case of Covid.

One of the most unbearable Duras movies. With photography by Sacha Vierny, Delphine Seyring more languid than ever, and beautiful images of the coast. So far the positive part.

As many times with Duras, the problem starts with the text: ridiculous, empty, contrived, and so underlined by the style of the film that it seems that we are being shouted that it is art with capital letters.

Again the usual zombies chatting slowly and staring into space for what seems like an eternity.

A tribute to that intellectual kitsch of the time, with all the clichés and fashionable stereotypes about immature and cowardly men, empathic, profound and understanding women. Affected playing, stupid dialogues (that telephone conversation! With poor Perier shouting Vera!... Vera!), a dash of classy French eroticism (Vera naked with a pearl necklace), and a desolate and luxurious background of an uninhabited mansion with impressive windows to provide easy beutiful images.

Duras continues to have followers, although her film work is largely forgotten. Compared to the highly esteemed Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Perec... the literary work of this author is too many times of a badly repressed sentimentality, only tolerated by a style reputed for its conciseness and supposed precision (favorite word among the french critics of that time).

I must say about the music, which is ironically referred to by the characters as "outer turbulence": it plays continuously from the second scene, for almost 90 minutes, in an unbearable uniform rhythm. It's pretty at first, over the lonely beaches, the mansions, and the desolate mansion rooms. In the end it is already torture.

Her cinema is different, assumed to be targeted for a minority, with artistic flair, but that doesn't make it good.

Anyway this is far better than Le camion. For an increasingly select minority.

A dull monotonous Andean-like melody (or sort of) almost ruins this un-emotional account of the dramatic evolution of a couple. As an annoying never-ending loop the melody keeps on going for almost 85 minutes or so of projection, without any reason. It is supposedly the music partygoers are playing or listening to, and it can be heard from the beach to the forest in Thionville... I have nothing against Marguerite Duras' oblique way to tell stories (I love "Hiroshima, mon amour" and "Moderato cantabile", finely and respectively cinematized by Alain Resnais and Peter Brook), but as a filmmaker herself she could have spare us of this silly "score" and leave us with her fascinating world of words.