Wanda

At last! An American director who can ingest European influences maturely, not as a superficial and desperate plea for depth. In its tale of a woman drifting through a barren landscape, falling in with abusive or indifferent men; in its distanced style, its pared down performances and dialogue, its long takes of nothing in particular, or rather, of everything, of life, mundane actions, of people looking and finding and doing; in its use of the crime genre for anti-generic and anti-narrative ends; in its restrained use of religious symbolism culminating in an enigmatic scene in a catacombs, one is reminded of Bresson - less rigorous, maybe, but less misogynistic too, more open.

The central relationship and road movie format reminds me of 'La Strada'; the bank robbery an absurdist take on 'Gun Crazy'. Mostly, this is a wonderful one-off, and it is a real crime that its maker only made this one film, while her husband was allowed over twenty.

...WANDA is nonetheless a stirring portrait of a woman who has lost her direction in life; that is, assuming she wasn't just going through the societally-mandated paces from the start, which I suspect.

Abandoning her husband and children without a second thought, she sets off on a journey to...nowhere in particular. Latching ignobly onto any man who will pick her up for a quickie, Wanda, played with remarkable veracity by the film's director Barbara Loden, drifts for a while until she stumbles upon a nomadic, dyspeptic robber, whom she meekly accompanies in his run from the law. After a series of escalating events which could have led to tragedy for her, Wanda is given a reprieve. Instead of taking advantage of her second chance, her detached indolence is too strong to overcome, and the cycle of soul-searching is apparently ordained to continue ad infinitum.

Recalling such contemporary cinematic works as FIVE EASY PIECES (1970), A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974), the great GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD (1970), and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) in its characters' aimlessness and blind existentialism, "Wanda" also has echoes of Bresson's oeuvre; most of all, the film seems to have been a direct influence on Susan Seidelman's SMITHEREENS (1982), an equally good picture.

To the film's detriment, its characters are such pathetic no-hopers that they are not easy to relate to, especially since they are given no biographical framework whatsoever. Moreover, the cinema verite direction is a little too self-consciously austere, lingering unduly on some scenes. Loden seems unaware of the misconception that merely letting the camera run on automatically lends a scene profundity; sometimes the film seems as hollow as its characters. Then again, that's the point. I liked "Wanda" quite a bit, but it takes patience to tease out its nuances, and is hence not for all tastes.

Sheez, what a depressing film. I think a lot of people can identify with it. A woman has no direction and no hope. She just sinks lower and lower without anyone to help her.

The film is slow and has quite a few unneccesary scenes, just like Wanda's life.

It is amazing a woman got this project made and was allowed to direct. I'm glad it exists as tribute to her. She passed away far too young. I hope her life wasn't as bleak as this story.

Saw 3/13/17, TCM on demand. Robert Bresson/Chantal Akerman/Frederick Wiseman come to the Pennsylvania coal country. "Wanda" prophetically showcases a world inhabited by a class of people Charles Murray would write about forty years later, as neglected and marginalized then as now. Maybe it's not a film for everybody, but I found myself involved in Wanda's story, a tale of drabness set in a world in a state of persistent, low-energy panic. Loden placed supreme confidence in camera, microphone, story, and her people. And the movie worked for me. The film TCM showed had been lovingly restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2010.

Mousy, uneducated, impoverished Wanda falls for a sleazy small-time crook, and they hit the road together. This movie has everything going against it--it's very low-key, cheaply made (dig that shaking camera), and paced only a little more swiftly than your average Andy Warhol film. But even though it plays like a cut-rate "Badlands," it succeeds powerfully in evoking sympathy for its pathetic title character. Its slow pace gives it a meditative quality for the patient viewer. Depressing but memorable; it should be more widely seen.