Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 230: Fri Aug 23

Baxter, Vera Baxter (Duras, 1977): ICA Cinema, 8.40pm


This film is part of the excellent Marguerite Duras season at the ICA (full details here) and is also being screened on August 10th.

ICA introduction:
This portrait of Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay) – an affectless bourgeois woman, and (as an ever-surprising Durassian voiceover tells us) witch – unfolds in an isolated modernist villa, bordering a forest. Her situation is revealed through the visits of two women, a former mistress of her husband (Noëlle Châtelet), and an unnamed woman (Delphine Seyrig), who coaxes her out of her silence. Through these conversations, staged theatrically in different rooms of the unadorned house, the source of Vera Baxter’s despondency gradually emerges. Her indifferent husband has sold her to other men for a million francs – the price required to cover the rental of the villa – turning her, reluctantly, into an adulteress (and a sex worker). Baxter, Vera Baxter was written against the backdrop of the Women’s Movement, with which Duras had a fluctuating and sometimes ambivalent relationship, and is arguably the film that deals most explicitly with feminist lines of questioning.

Here (and above) is an extract.

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