Wanda

Barbara Loden, the wife of film director Elia Kazan, wrote, directed and stars in this portrait of a born loser in blue-collar Pennsylvania. Wanda is the perfect bad example: she's poorly educated, unemployed, a doormat for any available man...and when she walks into a bar one night to use the bathroom, she has no idea the lone man inside is actually robbing the place. Loden, who looks like a bedraggled version of Joanne Woodward in some of her hick roles, also helped to raise the funds for this picture, which played film festivals and garnered good critical buzz yet wasn't widely distributed. The uneven sound is fuzzy, the camera-work is all over the place, and the lenient editing allows scenes to ramble on far longer than necessary (also the baby screaming during the film's opening five minutes was a big mistake). However, despite these serious faults, the movie has a realistically squalid, hopeless ambiance that is, at times, touching, pathetic, ingenuous and very natural. A bumpy ride, but worthwhile for fans of character studies. **1/2 from ****

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.

A fairly low budget effort but not without some interesting scenes, made even more interesting by decent performances from its two principals actors. Towards the end it seemed to wander a bit unsteadily, but then it ends in a haunting and memorably sad, final scene. Overall I would say its worth a watch, even though it falls short of being truly great.

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.

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.