India Song and Baxter, Vera Baxter: In the Thrall of Duras

Depopulating cinema was the method Duras used to ruin its realist vocation. Her rarefied cinema dared one to see less and listen more. While a focus on the rhythm and sonority of words was an early trademark of her film work, text imposed itself as presence most compellingly in her “Indian Cycle” films—Woman of the Ganges (1974), India Song, and Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta (1976). With The Truck (1977), a road movie with few exteriors that is devoted mostly to an on-screen reading by her and Gérard Depardieu, Duras continued to puncture cinema’s reliance on vision, making the medium over into a station for evocative listening: “Whenever you see a truck passing, it is a woman’s words that go by,” Jean-Luc Godard remarks in his homage to Duras in Every Man for Himself.

Cinema allowed Duras to multiply the internal projections opened up by written and spoken text. She called the reservoir where experience is decanted through progressive recitation the “internal shadow.” Like successive waves, her words crash into each other, erasing each other’s meanings, melding large and small universes. Already in her script for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), her paratactic style is captured in the opening montage of abstract bodies embracing and “drenched,” she writes, “with ashes, rain, dew, or sweat, whichever is preferred”—the flash of passion linked to the more public and explosive atomic aftermath. Over the skin, these deposited sediments condense the personal and historical dimensions of catastrophe and potential oblivion, vital issues for both Duras and Resnais.

Resnais had been drawn to Duras at the suggestion of a historian who had worked with him on Night and Fog (1956), Olga Wormser, a link that points to Duras’s prominence as a politically engaged intellectual in France, pre- and postwar. Born in 1914 in Saigon, then part of French Indochina, she lived in different places across Indochina with her parents, French colonial educators, and with her mother after her father’s passing. In the early 1930s, she moved to France, where she studied law and political science, and went on to work for the Intercolonial Service of Information and Documentation. She published her first novel in 1943, the same year she joined the Resistance. In 1945, she nursed her first husband, the writer Robert Antelme, back to health after he returned almost dead from Dachau. Forty years later, she would publish 
La douleur (translated into English as The War: A Memoir), which describes that experience.

After the war, her rue Saint-Benoît address in Paris became associated with lively debate among unorthodox intellectuals and anti-Stalinist communists. She promoted seminal work such as Edgar Morin’s Germany Year Zero and Antelme’s The Human Race through the press she cofounded, La Cité Universelle. She was also a sharp interviewer and critic, for both mainstream and specialized publications; took an active part in the anti–Algerian War movement, signing the Manifesto of the 121; and joined in the events of 1968. In the 1970s, she addressed women’s questions without ever embracing the label feminist. Later, Duras would insist that she always wrote “in the dimension of the camps, even if the words themselves were not articulated.”

Duras described these voices as constituting “a resonant mass which revolves around scarcely changing images . . . that anchor this mass in position, preventing it from drifting off toward illustration.” The actors never open their mouths, and yet their exchanges tease our desire for completion, to sync words to body language. At times the filmmaker, who worked extensively in the editing room, cues the offscreen conversation to characters who have just exited the frame. Besides “visible” dialogue, we hear “buried” or “lost voices,” in her words, corresponding to onlookers at the party. The voices of two young women, “sweet and tinged with madness,” correspond to what Duras called “the memory of forgetting.” They obsessively attempt to resuscitate the story of India Song. The guests at the reception speak of the present, while other voices (those of Dionys Mascolo, Duras’s second husband; Duras; and Viviane Forrester) refer to events in the past tense: “They would dance in the evening.” “They are dancing.”

Structured in a call-and-response format, the dialogue hangs as if in doubt, creating a sort of echo chamber where the present is continually being troubled. The recurring music on the soundtrack—“India Song Blues,” written by Carlos d’Alessio, and Beethoven’s fourteenth variation on a Diabelli valse—does not seem to be attached to past or present. Such music serves as a plaintive backdrop for an intricate interplay between presence and absence. In “Notes on India Song,” Duras states that “the photograph on the piano of the dead woman, Anne-Marie Stretter, with roses and incense in her memory—the altar . . . should . . . cast doubt on all that happened in the [reception] rectangle and around it.” Similarly, the salon’s mirror functions as a vanishing hole, while tableaux crossed by cycles of light and darkness confound sleep, ennui, and death. Repeated pans over such items as a wig, her red dress, a black robe mortify Stretter, even as she appears radiant and dancing in the next shot.

Compounding this limbo effect, Duras replayed the taped dialogue of India Song during filming, so that, listening to both their own words and screen directions, the actors would become distracted, less present to themselves. Moreover, Duras directed the dialogue in a slowed-down tempo, with all intonation eliminated, to give the impression of a reading “which has been performed before.”

In an interview in the book Marguerite Duras tourne un film, actor Mathieu Carrière detailed Duras’s mise-en-scène: “After organizing [the scene] as a photo or still life, she [would] ask for smoke from incense, reinforce a dissymmetry in the depth of field, indicate a minuscule [change] in gesture.” Referring to the filming of the eerily silent scene where Stretter and her lovers sit for a drink at the Prince of Wales Hotel, he recounted: “One became morbidly alert once she posed this sort of challenge: ‘I paralyze you, and if you are dead at the French Embassy in India, try then to smoke a cigarette.’ ”

The choice to eliminate extras clinched the film’s theatricalized poetics. Filtered down to only five visible main characters and a few fixed locations, Duras’s compact setup can only, like a centrifuge, spin and intensify. Three of the men—Michael Richardson (Claude Mann), the young attaché (Carrière), and the young guest (Didier Flamand)—will be or have been Stretter’s lovers. Proscribed from entering this intimate circle, the vice-consul (Michael Lonsdale) and the beggar woman—whose laughter and untranslated chatter we hear but do not comprehend—are paired. Consigned to the embassy’s edges, each represents a possible response to colonial absurdity: Both go mad—the beggar woman drifting in innocence, while the vice-consul falls into a despair that comes from full knowledge. Both trail Stretter, the white woman of Calcutta, contaminating her by association.

Duras cared little for geographical accuracy, warning the viewer that she used “the names of Indian towns, rivers, states, and seas . . . primarily in a musical sense.” And yet, even as she assigned a purely poetic resonance to words, she transformed Calcutta and Lahore (as with Hiroshima and Nevers in Hiroshima mon amour) into ciphers for a phantasmic, crumbling empire—Anne-Marie Stretter as Calcutta, the vice-consul as Lahore.

India Song stages one answer to a persistent Durasian question: How can a story of love and desire match an end-of-the-world tragedy? In response, the narrative wavers between the seemingly inconsequential circulation of desire and lassitude among white people and an uncontainable disturbance represented by the madness of colonial order. If, in fact, the chorus reigns supreme in India Song, then the film’s tragedy wells up from the insidious manner in which polite conversation absorbs the scandal of the vice-consul’s crying out of Stretter’s name, as in the overheard dialogue “In a way, we should all be screaming. Why? I mean, in a manner of speaking . . .” D’Alessio’s score has a similarly pitiless function. Ranging from tangos to valses, ragtimes, blues, and rumbas, the music, always light, erupts, as Duras says, “despite the event—the vice-consul’s scream, for instance.”

Duras eventually anchors this dramatic disturbance to a broader historical backdrop, pinning Stretter’s death to a date. Duras’s and Viviane Forrester’s mellifluous voices alternate in a fated lineup of thirties debacles: “It was a September evening, during the summer monsoon on the islands, in 1937. In China, the war went on. Shanghai had just been bombed. The Japanese were still advancing. In Spain, they were still fighting. The republic is strangled. The Congress of Nuremberg had just taken place.”

Duras’s next film, Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta, is the culmination of the Indian Cycle’s undoing of cinema and, for her, the ultimate riddance of the Stretter character. The film consists of the soundtrack of India Song played in its entirety over images of the crumbling interiors and exteriors of the Château Rothschild, the location on the outskirts of Paris where much of India Song was shot, the sound reverberating in the deserted location. During the 
making of Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta, Duras walked alongside Bruno Nuytten, her cinematographer (here as on India Song), matching the sound playing from a tape recorder to his tracking shots. The director had fixated on this palace in the Bois de Boulogne, used as Nazi quarters in World War II and never again occupied by the Rothschild family, as the setting for India Song. Frozen in its layered history, this husk of a husk of a location is her choice for a final mourning—a “deserted” place, she said, “to speak of the end of the world.”

After completing her India-related work and The Truck’s radical experiment with cinematic listening, Duras returned, with Baxter, Vera Baxter (1977), to a set of motifs that she had first explored in Nathalie Granger (1972): a feminine universe where silence reigns, where a house is a safe and threatening place, and where bordering exteriors, forest and sea, are made strange by the wan winter light. The two films share an exquisite, composed sense of foreboding, though the pervasive uncanny in Nathalie Granger—with its figuration of women sorceresses, black cat and all—is diluted in Baxter, Vera Baxter’s more abstract proposition, a harsh take on bourgeois conformity and prostitution, or, in the author’s words, “an infernal circuit that shuttles her from the love of her children to her conjugal duties.”

Baxter, Vera Baxter is, typically for Duras, a stage in self-correction.The film takes its main plot elements from her 1968 play Suzanna Andler, which she went on to dismiss as a “commercial gamble, full of the most embarrassing conventional melodramatic material.” The play focuses on a triangle. The title character is a faithful wife and devoted mother. Her husband is continually having affairs and is defined by his ability to make money and control his wife, whom we find at a luxurious villa they are about to rent. This extravagance will cost a million francs, the same sum of money her husband paid for his wife’s first affair, in an arrangement with the lover, Michel Cayre (played in the film by Depardieu). But while the play foregrounds the end of conjugal love through this infidelity, hinting at Suzanna’s intention of leaving with her lover, the film focuses instead on the effects of Vera Baxter’s “infernal fidelity.”

The main structural difference between play and film is the introduction in the latter of a fourth character, “the unknown,” who converses at length with Vera Baxter (Claudine Gabay), thereby transforming the intrigue from a dramatized crisis into a verbalized discussion about her plight—deflecting the play’s melodramatic elements through strategic indirection. Reported conversation, hesitant remarks, and oblique performances match the main theme: the protagonist’s avoidance of major ruptures in her bourgeois life. As Duras wrote about Vera Baxter’s passivity and devotion to marriage, “it is as if when she moved, she went around herself, [avoiding] her own body.”

This suspended quality defines the film’s aesthetics. Repeated phone calls to Vera Baxter, at first with no answer on the line, punctuate the film, pervading it with a growing sense of alarm, as she sits alone in the empty house. Duras cuts away to shots of sea vistas and other outdoor spaces during the theatrical interior scenes, in which the actors seem to be in abeyance, standing as if halted midstride or treading slowly as if presaging catastrophe. And yet the dialogue, recapitulating facts about the Baxters’ relationship, hints that the worst (Vera Baxter’s impending suicide at the villa?) may have already happened. The lengthier and most perplexing conversations are between Vera Baxter and the women who come to visit her: first, one of her husband’s ex-lovers (Noëlle Châtelet), then “the unknown,” played by Seyrig, who appears uninvited and starts questioning Vera Baxter’s life as a wife, mother, and lover, as if to help her gain a grasp on her identity.

Confirming the tense chemistry between “the unknown” and Vera Baxter, Duras admitted she spoiled the film by deciding to make the character a woman. In an interview where she announced she would write a new scenario to correct this, she explained that if the stranger had been a man, his visit, motivated by his attraction to Vera Baxter’s name, would have been a matter of desire. Instead, “influenced by the woman’s movement,” Duras opted for a female figure, creating an unintended effect of militancy. She would say: “If it does not work, it is simply because that does not interest me.”

And yet it is to this particular “unknown,” played by one of the most recognizable stars of European art cinema—a well-known feminist activist and the lead in Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feminist masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—
that Duras gives some of her most cherished lines, including a passage from Jules Michelet’s 1862 history La sorcière she often cited to address the power of women’s reserve and silence: “Witches have come like that. During the Middle Ages, men were at wars, the Crusades, and country women remained alone, isolated, months and months in huts in the forest . . . 
It is in this solitude that they start speaking to trees, plants, inventing an intelligence with nature. They were called sorceresses and were burned.” Duras adds, “One of them was called Vera Baxter.”

In the early seventies, Duras had aligned herself with a disruptive, differential feminism, advanced in Xavière Gauthier’s journal Sorcières, which Duras helped name. Seyrig’s ventriloquizing of this passage on women’s singular proscribed language makes the actor into Duras’s ensorcelled envoy.

Because Vera Baxter and her husband are always addressed or referred to by their full names, “Baxter” becomes the most heard sound besides d’Alessio’s score, which consists of Andean flute music that rises and fades throughout the entire film, erupting as if by gusts of wind. The music, with its slightly pagan quality, is explained diegetically as coming from a party among foreigners staying at the edge of the forest, an “exterior turbulence.” Music and names are essential parts of Duras’s poetic arsenal. Baxter, Vera Baxter promotes an extremely abstract convergence between the perverse continuance of conjugal rituals and the random threat of unrest that ripples through d’Alessio’s insistent melodic beat. At the film’s end, and after the circular talks about the Baxters that echo their exhausted relationship, “the unknown” walks with Vera Baxter through the glass-enclosed villa. As if under a spell, they seem to be wading through a viscous void. By having d’Alessio’s music accompany this contrived ballet of tortured bourgeois women, Duras seals her indictment of conjugal compliance.

Many people, listening to “India Song Blues,” have mistakenly believed it to be a tune from the thirties—as irresistible for the fictional characters as it is for us—rather than one composed for the film. Similarly, the music from the outside threatening Vera Baxter’s muffled existence seems to be found material. That’s the genius of d’Alessio’s distinct scores. And yet their exacting structuring function in each film, along with the formidably different Seyrig performances across both, is just one measure of the range of Duras’s artistic spell in creating phantasmagorias of exclusion and expressive turbulences.