A thousand years ago, they say, there were women who, alone in the middle of the forests that bordered the Atlantic, would wait in their shacks for their husbands who were far away: either fighting the Lord’s War, or in the Crusades. And, it was during this time, that these women began to talk to the trees, to the sea, to the animals of the forest. They were called ‘witches’, and they were burned to death.

One of these women was named Vera Baxter.

This portrait of Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay) – an affectless bourgeois woman, and (as an ever-surprising Durassian voiceover tells us) witch – unfolds in an isolated modernist villa, bordering a forest. Her situation is revealed through the visits of two women, a former mistress of her husband (Noëlle Châtelet), and an unnamed woman (Delphine Seyrig), who coaxes her out of her silence. Through these conversations, staged theatrically in different rooms of the unadorned house, the source of Vera Baxter’s despondency gradually emerges. Her indifferent husband has sold her to other men for a million francs – the price required to cover the rental of the villa – turning her, reluctantly, into an adulteress (and a sex worker). Baxter, Vera Baxter was written against the backdrop of the Women’s Movement, with which Duras had a fluctuating and sometimes ambivalent relationship, and is arguably the film that deals most explicitly with feminist lines of questioning.

Following their collaboration on the ‘Indian Cycle’ of films, composer Carlos d’Alessio returns with a single track, consisting of Andean flute and guitar, that loops throughout the entire film, contrasting with Vera Baxter’s lethargy, and, once again, juxtaposing rural France with a non-Western culture.