Baxter, Vera Baxter
Directed byMarguerite Duras
Written byMarguerite Duras
Produced byStéphane Tchalgadjieff
Danièle Gégauff
StarringClaudine Gabay
Delphine Seyrig
Gérard Depardieu
CinematographySacha Vierny
Music byCarlos d'Alessio
Production
companies
Institut National de l'Audiovisuel
Sunchild Productions
Distributed byRoissy Films
Release date
1977
Running time
95 minutes
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench

Baxter, Vera Baxter is a 1977 French film directed by Marguerite Duras, based on her then-unpublished novel Vera Baxter ou les Plages de l'Atlantique.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

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]

Cast

Crew

Home video

The film was released in blu-ray and DVD formats by the Criterion Collection.[1]


  1. 1 2 Duras, Marguerite. "Baxter, Vera Baxter". Criterion Collection.
  2. Margulies, Ivone. "India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter: In the Thrall of Duras".
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