Saturday | January 25, 2025 9:30 pm

Baxter, Vera Baxter

Directed by Marguerite Duras.
With Delphine Seyrig, Noëlle Châtelet, Nathalie Neil.
France, 1977, DCP, color, 95 min.
French with English subtitles.
DCP source: Institut National de l'Audiovisuel

In her final film with Marguerite Duras, Seyrig takes a supporting role as an unknown woman who visits the title character—an unhappily married woman played by Claudine Gabay—in her modern villa. Conventional drama is sidelined in favor of charged extended dialogues between, at first, Vera and her husband’s ex-lover (Noëlle Châtelet), and then Vera and Seyrig’s unknown woman, who questions Vera’s understanding of motherhood and marriage. Though Duras did not intend this relationship to carry feminist undertones, the casting of Seyrig with her activist credentials inevitably lend the dialogue an empowering edge.

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