Baxter, Vera Baxter

Baxter, Vera Baxter is a 1977 French film directed by Marguerite Duras, based on her then-unpublished novel Vera Baxter ou les Plages de l'Atlantique.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

Cast

 * Claudine Gabay as Vera Baxter
 * Delphine Seyrig as The unknown woman
 * Gérard Depardieu as Michel Cayre
 * Noëlle Châtelet as Monique Combès
 * Claude Aufort as The barman

Crew

 * Director: Marguerite Duras
 * Written by: Marguerite Duras
 * Director of photography: Sacha Vierny
 * Sound: Guillaume Sciama
 * Script supervisor: Geneviève Dufour
 * Set photographer: Jean Mascolo
 * Editor: Dominique Auvray, Caroline Camus, Roselyne Petit
 * Original music: Carlos d’Alessio
 * Producer: Stéphane Tchal Gadjieff

Home video
The film was released in blu-ray and DVD formats by the Criterion Collection.