Chamber Music for Solo Voices and Distant Party: Baxter, Vera Baxter

[…] it’s the voice that acts, that produces desire and emotion. The voice is stronger than physical presence. It’s as important as the face, the eyes, the smile.
– Marguerite Duras¹

At first, Vera Baxter is an absence: someone people talk about in a bar. An abstraction made of words – the words of Michel Cayre, her lover (Gérard Depardieu), those of the barman (Claude Aufort), those of a friend of the family (Noëlle Châtelet). An unknown woman (Delphine Seyrig) listens and occasionally asks questions. The voices are calm, even when they speak about love, about worries, about passion. They are rhythmic and musical in a way that is at the centre of Marguerite Duras’ cinema, from her first film (La Musica, 1966). They are different and at the same time they have something in common, like illustrations of the writer-director’s concerns about her own voice: “When I speak, I have a negative concern, I’m taking care not to move away from the neutral ground where all words are equal.”² These voices make up the first movement of what will become a chamber music piece.

We find out that Vera Baxter is visiting a villa her husband wants to rent. But when we first see this villa, it is empty. Vera Baxter is still an absence. The soundtrack is now invaded by some joyous, party music that will be repeated in a loop for the rest of the film. Written by Carlos d’Alessio, a constant collaborator of Duras (for whom he wrote the hypnotic cult soundtrack for India Song, 1975), this music will serve the role of accompaniment to the next three movements of the voice sonata. We will find out later that the music is probably coming from a party in one of the villas. One character calls it “an external turbulence”. It is the only sign that there is life outside the rooms inhabited by Vera Baxter and her visitors.

Vera Baxter’s (Claudine Gabay) solitude in the vast reception room at the villa is interrupted by three conversations: the first with the friend we have seen earlier in the bar, the second one a phone conversation with her husband, and a third one – the most substantial – with the stranger from the bar. All the while, she seems to be alone in her own world. “If solitude is discussed, we think that people are at the same time too alone and not alone enough. Most people marry to get out of solitude” wrote Duras.³ Baxter, Vera Baxter is a case in point.

The conversations that follow, each with its distinct rhythm and themes, are parts of a bigger composition. The voices are instruments that carry motifs and weave patterns of sound. It is through words, not action or representation, that we piece together information about Vera Baxter: Vera Baxter is a wife and a mother; Vera Baxter is an adulteress; Vera Baxter only ever loved her husband; Vera Baxter is rich – or rather her husband is; Vera Baxter is lonely; Vera Baxter is a liar; Vera Baxter is suicidal. Vera Baxter contradicts herself. “No, it’s not true!” –  she tells her friend, who replies that indeed, both of them tell lots of lies. Once the lie is acknowledged, the story can be told differently later – variations on a common theme, developed through a different melodic line and maybe in a different combination of voices/instruments.

The dialogue is also full of leitmotifs, of names and words repeated at irregular intervals, with their own musicality: Bordeaux, Chantilly, the Balearics. And the protagonist’s name, repeated in that curious manner: Baxter, Vera Baxter. It is this name that attracts the stranger, that makes her curious to meet the person who owns it. She says it is the name of one woman burned as a witch because she was talking to the trees, to the sea, to the animals while her husband was away at war. Vera Baxter’s husband is away, but not at war – unless it’s the war of the sexes. Vera Baxter talks to the strangers who appear in the house as if out of nowhere, possible materialisations of the phantasms her own mind.

The stranger is none other than Delphine Seyrig, another one of Duras’ longtime collaborators from her first film, La Musica. Seyrig’s voice is one of the most instantly recognisable in cinema. Duras, who considered her the best French actress and compared her to Greta Garbo, declared that she would have hired her without knowing her, just after hearing her voice over the phone. A voice she describes as giving the impression of “experiencing an extreme, physical pleasure in speaking. It is as if she has just finished eating some fruit, that her mouth is still moist and it is in this freshness, sweet, sour, green, summery that the words are formed, and the sentences, and the speeches, and they come to us and rejuvenate us all at once.”⁴ This sensorial pleasure of the speaking voice is communicated to us throughout the whole last movement of this chamber piece. However, when Duras published the final version of the script, she decided she had made a fatal error: the stranger should have been a man.⁵ The music of mutual understanding should be replaced with the music of desire. The film that we watch is not the definitive version, but we can ask ourselves if without Seyrig’s incantations the magic would work as well.

For Duras, each film contains two different films: an image film and a “voice film”.⁶ They should not duplicate each other. They are autonomous, but not divergent. While she had always stressed the importance of the words in her films, Duras collaborated with some of the best cinematographers of the time. The beautiful images that emerge through the cracks in the sound of voices and the sound of silences are photographed by the incomparable Sacha Vierny. Once again, someone who worked with Duras on her first film and whose lighting of Seyrig in Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) contributed to launching her alluring and mysterious image of international art cinema diva.

At the end of the film, Vera Baxter and the stranger prepare to leave the house before darkness falls, maybe before the silent phantoms of the night take possession of the empty villa. The phantasms of the human voices are coming down to earth. They do not speak anymore of impossible desires, of witches and death. They discuss the weather in Paris. It is time for us to leave the cinema. But the subtle hum of this chamber music for voices goes on playing in our heads. The magic is done.

Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977 France 90 min)

Prod: Sunchild, INA Dir, Scr: Marguerite Duras Phot: Sacha Vierny Mus: Carlos d’Alessio Ed: Dominique Auvray, Caroline Camus, Roselyne Petit

Cast: Claudine Gabay, Delphine Seyrig, Gérard Depardieu, Noëlle Châtelet, Claude Aufort, Nathalie Nell

Endnotes