Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Marguerite Duras
Writers: Marguerite Duras
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Noëlle Châtelet, Nathalie Nell

Marguerite Duras reunited with India Song collaborators Delphine Seyrig and composer Carlos d’Alessio for this hypnotically unsettling journey into one woman’s existential emptiness. Ensconced in a sprawling rental villa, the world-weary Vera Baxter (Claudine 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. Setting her languid images to d’Alessio’s incongruously breezy, endlessly looping score, Duras fashions a quietly shattering portrait of marriage as a kind of prison.

Two Films by Marguerite Duras:
Marguerite Duras had already established herself as one of the major figures of postwar French literature when she launched an equally fascinating and unclassifiable career in cinema, translating her elliptical, experimental style to the screen through an unprecedented fusion of hypnotic, highly stylized imagery and radically disjunctive sound. Boldly reimagining the possibilities of dialogue, music, silence, and architectural space, the tantalizing, sphinxlike evocations of soul-deep female malaise India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter embody Duras’s singular multisensory approach, with each opening up new spaces for the expression of women’s interior worlds.

Extras:
- 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Marguerite as She Was, a 2003 portrait of Duras
- Interview from 1977 with Duras
- New English subtitle translation




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