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. 

Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

I remember the long dorm-room discussion after my friends and I saw this film for the first time, so I was surprised on returning to it after so many years how conventional the elements we talked about now seem. The extended use of documentary clips at the beginning of the film, with the voiceover by the lovers (Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada) arguing about whether she had really seen anything in Hiroshima, seemed to us a bafflingly random way to start a movie. The jump cuts into and out of flashbacks confused us. What, we argued, did it signify that their entwined bodies, seemingly covered with ashes, then began to glow? (Today, I'm afraid some sarcastic voice will pipe up to say, "They've been glitter-bombed.") Why does she refer to her Japanese lover as "you" when she's actually talking about the German she loved during the war? Is the movie really about sleeping with the enemy? Doesn't it trivialize the horror of Hiroshima to bring it down to the level of the background for a love affair? Today, we'd regard those questions as naive, and I'm certain we wouldn't be confused by the film's structure, which is a way of saying that Resnais and his screenwriter, Marguerite Duras, really did succeed in revolutionizing movies. But if no one is startled by jump cuts or unconventional narrative devices today, there remains a raw immediacy about the film that no subsequent imitators have ever quite succeeded in equaling. Much credit also has to go to the score by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco, and to the editing by Michio Takahashi and Sacha Vierny.