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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