Wanda

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source: Wanda

Trailer—Wanda

Wanda

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.

Relentlessly grim and depressing, which is of course the point. Is this woman trapped because of the limited options in her gritty, blue-collar world, or because she's so mind-numbingly passive? It's hard to say, but probably some of both, and she's hard to empathize with. The film feels honest to a sad life experience, with the title character (Barbara Loden) listlessly falling under the sway of men and with the director (also Loden) avoiding big Hollywood type moments, but it wasn't an enjoyable watch.

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.

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.

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.