Baxter, Vera Baxter is a 1977 French drama film written and directed by Marguerite Duras, based on her then-unpublished novel Vera Baxter ou les Plages de l'Atlantique.
The film opens with Vera Baxter 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 present, who has failed to get in touch with Vera Baxter. We see Vera again in a grande rental villa. She receives two visitors, and we hear her story about her marriage from these conversations.
The Criterion Collection described Baxter, Vera Baxter as a "hypnotically unsettling journey into one woman's existential emptiness. Ensconced in a sprawling rental villa, the world-weary Vera Baxter ... receives visits from two women, including a mysterious stranger ... to whom she recounts a shocking story about her marriage, the way she lives, and the reasons for her malaise."[1] Ivone Margulies, also writing for The Criterion Collection, viewed the film as "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.'"[2]
Home media
Baxter, Vera Baxter was released by The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and DVD on 28 February 2023 as part of the Two Films by Marguerite Duras box set along with India Song (1975).[3]
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