A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label Baxter Vera Baxter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Baxter Vera Baxter. Show all posts

Sunday, September 20, 2026

Baxter, Vera Baxter (Marguerite Duras, 1977)

Claudine Gabay and Delphine Seyrig in Baxter, Vera Baxter

Cast : Delphine Seyrig, Claudine Gabay, Gérard Depardieu, Noëlle Châtelet, Claude Aufaure, François Périer ( voice ). Screenplay : Marguerite Duras. Cinematography: Sacha Vierny. Film editing : Dominique Auvray, Caroline Camus, Roselyne Petit. Music : Carlos D'Alessio. 

Static in the extreme, Marguerite Duras's Baxter, Vera Baxter gets what little energy it has from the music of Carlos D'Alessio, a kind of nagging on-again, off-again presence throughout the film that is explained as coming from a nearby party, although Duras clearly doesn't intend us to take the explanation seriously. Otherwise, it's a movie about people talking about the title character (Claudine Gabay) and her husband, Jean (François Périer's voice), and a man named Michel Cayre (Gérard Depardieu in what amounts to a cameo). Most of this talk is generated by a woman who remains anonymous (Delphine Seyrig), who hears the name Vera Baxter in a hotel bar and decides to know more. It takes her about 90 minutes to explore the marriage of Vera and Jean and its relationship to Michel, and if you're like me, you may be wondering why we should care. This is cinema as contemplative object, which goes against the very nature of the medium. 

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