Over a slow hour and a half, Duras' film unfolds in three scenes: narrative openings at a hotel bar introduce us to the absent figure of Vera Baxter, who waits in a large and empty villa she's set to rent; in the villa, Vera is visited by the former mistress of her husband, the enormously wealthy Jean Baxter; subsequently-in the film's real centre-the stranger (Delphine Seyrig) who'd heard Baxter's backstory at the hotel turns up at the house un-announced, listening in on a phone conversation between Baxter and her husband in which, with apparent, but unconvincingly finality, Vera announces that it's over, and then, in the subsequent, lengthy dialogue, insists that Baxter-who admits to frequently lying-will reveal her 'secret'. All this to slow pans around the enormous, clean, empty and arid villa, paid for with Jean's money; shots of the beach where Vera grew up; and of Thionville, the town where she now finds herself: sea, ruins and woods, emptied of people, but with an incessant, endlessly looped piece of South American music for pipe, guitar and handclaps, described by the characters as the sounds of a party from the villa nearest the sea, and in the film somewhere between diegetic and non-diegetic, real and hallucinated, ambient suggestion and maddening itch, a fly that won't go back out through the window. The revelation, if revelation it is, that Vera's one extra-marital affair was in fact set up by Jean as payment for a gambling debt reveals to a greater and more shocking extent the prison which is this bourgeois marriage-a marriage to a man, friends of her brothers, met as a teenager, enormously wealthy, but, according to Vera, a man who 'has money' rather than a 'rich man', who compulsively spends on gambling and on women in order to cover for his own lack. Vera in turn serves as accoutrement to the house (already paid for by Jean before Vera has even decided whether or not to say) as accoutrement to wife as accoutrement to husband, a financialised transaction in which sexual encounter serves as a payment for a debt between men, in which any act of freedom or defiance seems already circumscribed in a vicious circle of icy control. Vera has been sitting in the house, refusing to the answer the phone to her husband, her lover, the estate agent, contemplating suicide. But towards the film's end, the stranger tells her of the women who waited for their husbands, on holy wars or crusades, who learned to communicate with animals and forests, who were burned at the stake: one of these women was Vera Baxter, she informs her, in a flash of analysis that brings together the film's glacially, even languorously excoriating demolition of patriarchal marriage. At the film's end, the two depart for the hotel in town, not so much in sisterhood or escape, but with some slowly deepening knowledge beyond the incessant lies, tellings and re-tellings that both entrap and, perhaps, contain the seeds to understanding, itself the seed for liberation.
Review of Baxter, Vera Baxter
