I don’t know whether the title of Marguerite Duras’
Baxter,
Vera Baxter is consciously intended to evoke “Bond, James Bond,” but it’s an
instructive point of comparison either way: as spoken by Bond, it’s a construction
emblematic of certainty, of an identity and affect so firmly established that a
periodic change of actors is not just tolerated but actually part of the fun. Duras’
film has as much tangible presence as any Bond film, every expression and
exchange seeming weighted with significance, but the accumulation of “facts”
about Vera’s life can no more yield her truth than a biographical summary can
explain a painting, and it comes to feel that the film isn’t investigating the
woman Vera Baxter as much as it’s investigating the entire notion of cinematic
investigations of women. The film’s startling and disorienting opening shots, of
a classically-posed, semi-nude Vera, suggest at once an objectification and also
(because there’s something immediately defiant about it) a challenge, a sense encouraged
by the opening scenes in which Vera is absent, but actively evoked and
discussed. Thereafter, the majority of the film takes place in a villa she’s
thinking of renting, but which in fact has already been rented by her (heard on
the phone, but never seen) husband, who is elsewhere with his lover: her story
(or fragments of it) emerges in conversation with a stranger (Delphine Seyrig)
who turns up on a pretext – the stranger’s real reason for being there, it
seems, is simply the allure of that name, Vera Baxter, a name in which she
detects historical resonances which, of course, can reveal little now. The musical
backdrop (identified by one online commenter as the most annoying he’s ever
heard) is a strenuously upbeat creation of strings and woodwinds that although
attributed to coming from a nearby party, clearly can’t
really be
explained as such in its nature and repetition, and thereby represents much in
the movie as a whole, evading and surpassing the explanations offered.
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