Baxter, Vera Baxter

Răpciune

27Apr13

really represent defenses against the anxiety of loneliness, worries over being left out, displaced, unplaced? Also, actors as voices, as mere vehicles of spoken drama, as materialzed shadows detaching from the walls one by one: you don’t need fully blown characters to convey despair here, the actors could be sitting face to the wall, they could be anyone, reading a text, taking part in a dialogue that has already, forever, begun before they entered the scene. The schematism of their play as a means to show a growing twilight of the soul. Why would Vera retain anything of her personality, when she’s given up all hopes of convalescence long ago? We still don’t know who she is, other than a voice and a story, that could be anyone else’s, since the fluctuating passion, the sinuous diction she’d use when emotionally outlining her life story, is missing. Only occasionally dust devils spring up in the placid crypts under the eyelids. When life wanes in someone, they lose character, colour, identity, they become discourse, words, speaking stream of odorless indifference. A man pays another man to satisfy his wife, whom he does not desire anymore. He would pay anything, including a million, to get that job done: the gratification of the woman he does not want to touch, out of guilt perhaps or out of imagination, but with whom he still keeps a civilzed, amiable, transparent relationship. A clean, monstrous, financially hygienized form of rejection and irreversible separation. Going back to pre-currency times: a villa for a wife’s luxury love affair. The film also presents an intriguing genealogy of the witch phenomenon: women, waiting for their husbands to return from the holy war, developed an alternative, healing heresy of despair, of interrupted dialogue: talking to nature.