Event

BAXTER VERA BAXTER

Dir. Marguerite Duras, 1977.
France. 91 min.

The masterful Marguerite Duras takes a concept ripe for portentous melodrama slimy Gerard Depardieu sells his wife (Claudine Gabay) to erase a debt and minimizes it, radicalizes it, and chills it into droll satire with an enrapturing cadence. Seyrig plays an unknown woman who is inexplicably drawn to Gabays Vera when she hears her name. She gradually interrogates Vera, and their conversation becomes entangled with Carlos dAlessios omnipresent, repetitive score. Duras film is an exhausting, rewarding experience, and truly one of a kind.

*****

When Delphine Seyrigs fairy godmother character nonchalantly descends in a helicopter upon the Medieval fairy tale realm of Jacques Demys Donkey Skin, the surreal image is pretty indicative of Seyrigs regrettably short, enormously prolific (she appeared in over sixty films and only lived until age fifty-eight), and trenchantly unforgettable career. Seyrig had an innate ability to transcend every film in which she appeared, regardless of what auteur was directing.

She mostly famously worked with Chantal Akerman, Alain Resnais, and Luis Buñuel, but also Robert Frank, Francois Truffaut, and Harold Pinter. Among the first filmmakers to make use of video in France, Seyrig co-founded a radical, anarchistic collective of feminist filmmakers and directed two feature documentaries (Sois belle et this-toi and Maso et miso vont en bateau) and several shorts, including a wonderfully droll reading of the SCUM Manifesto with filmmaker Carole Rossoupoulos. Digging through Seyrigs filmography is an endlessly rewarding excavation of idiosyncratic gems, from queer vampire thrillers to pioneering camp adaptations of Virginia Woolfs Orlando.