Director/writer: Barbara Loden
Photography/editor: Nicholas T. Proferes
Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier
Although director and writer Barbara Loden made two more short films in 1975, The Frontier Experience (25 minutes) and The Boy Who Liked Deer (18 minutes), Wanda was her only feature. She died in 1980 at the age of 48 having spent most of her career as a model or stage and occasional film actress. The filmmaker Elia Kazan was a kind of mentoring figure for her. She appeared in his Splendor in the Grass in 1961, won a Tony Award in 1964 for After the Fall (directed by Kazan), and married Kazan in 1967. Her bleak vision and semi-improvisational film style have earned her comparisons to John Cassavettes. Wanda got some attention at the time it was released, including an International Critics Award from the Venice Film Festival, but for the most part it has lingered in obscurity until more recently, when a resurgence of interest in women’s pictures gave it renewed life. Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this trend was Chantal Akerman’s long domestic meditation, Jeanne Dielman, which won the most recent Sight & Sound poll and shot up from #85 to #12 in one year on the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Since 2006 Wanda, similarly, has risen from as low as #864 in that survey to its present position at #151.
Wanda is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden and home of the US version of The Office. It is punishingly low-budget, opening on a desolate scene of a giant coal mining operation and a house that is absurdly there. The house belongs to Wanda’s sister and brother-in-law. She is crashing there but not particularly welcome. She has a date that day in divorce court, where she appears late and wearing rollers in her hair. Her husband, her two kids, and her husband’s new girlfriend are stuck waiting for her. “She doesn’t care about anything,” the husband tells the judge while they are waiting. “She’s a lousy wife. She’s always bumming around, drinking.” This remark, coming so early in the picture, set up an expectation for me that turns out not to be true at all.
Although director and writer Barbara Loden made two more short films in 1975, The Frontier Experience (25 minutes) and The Boy Who Liked Deer (18 minutes), Wanda was her only feature. She died in 1980 at the age of 48 having spent most of her career as a model or stage and occasional film actress. The filmmaker Elia Kazan was a kind of mentoring figure for her. She appeared in his Splendor in the Grass in 1961, won a Tony Award in 1964 for After the Fall (directed by Kazan), and married Kazan in 1967. Her bleak vision and semi-improvisational film style have earned her comparisons to John Cassavettes. Wanda got some attention at the time it was released, including an International Critics Award from the Venice Film Festival, but for the most part it has lingered in obscurity until more recently, when a resurgence of interest in women’s pictures gave it renewed life. Perhaps the most famous beneficiary of this trend was Chantal Akerman’s long domestic meditation, Jeanne Dielman, which won the most recent Sight & Sound poll and shot up from #85 to #12 in one year on the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Since 2006 Wanda, similarly, has risen from as low as #864 in that survey to its present position at #151.
Wanda is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden and home of the US version of The Office. It is punishingly low-budget, opening on a desolate scene of a giant coal mining operation and a house that is absurdly there. The house belongs to Wanda’s sister and brother-in-law. She is crashing there but not particularly welcome. She has a date that day in divorce court, where she appears late and wearing rollers in her hair. Her husband, her two kids, and her husband’s new girlfriend are stuck waiting for her. “She doesn’t care about anything,” the husband tells the judge while they are waiting. “She’s a lousy wife. She’s always bumming around, drinking.” This remark, coming so early in the picture, set up an expectation for me that turns out not to be true at all.
What I took from it is that she’s alcoholic and we’re about to see one of those sodden busted-down tales of drunkenness like Barfly or Leaving Las Vegas. And in many ways that’s right, but minus the drinking. Wanda’s crisis is at once more existential and more pedestrian, a product as I see it of undiagnosed depression, so misunderstood still in 1970 that the picture itself seems unaware of it in many ways, even though it is practically a clinic on the disorder. Wanda seems to have no purpose or will, wandering from incident to incident in a naïve haze. In her 30s, she is attractive, capable of picking up men at will (or, more accurately, against her will). She craves love. It is a bottomless need we can feel from way over here. She has given up on finding it, but the need persists like a maddening itch. She winds up with grotesque death-of-a-salesman types, the first of which ditches her out of the motel room at his first opportunity, running for his car.
The second, Mr. Dennis as he apparently wants to be addressed, is a low-level career criminal and disgusting pig, though he dresses self-consciously in jackets and ties, with a natty salt-and-pepper mustache. He is played awkwardly but competently by Michael Higgins like he’s shooting for the drive-ins. Wanda simply falls into the orbit of this guy. He steals cars and rips off people at every chance, but Wanda tends to ignore it, evidently preferring not to think about it and capable of putting it out of her mind with great force. Way late in the game she acts surprised. “Hey,” she says, “what are you getting me involved in here?”
Nothing good—a bank robbery plot with side dish of scripted home invasion and terrorism. Wanda goes along because she doesn’t know any better and doesn’t want to be alone. She doesn’t want to start over, even though she’s been with this creep for no more than a matter of weeks. Do we question her torpor and seeming lack of motivation and assign her some blame or responsibility? I suppose, yes, in a way we do, or I did. No doubt many viewers (including non-viewers put off by the descriptions who don’t want to look at it and haven’t) write her off entirely. I’m often impatient with her decisions and ways of going about things, but I keep thinking I understand the place of depression this is coming from.
Wanda is about as bleak and downbeat as can be, but somehow it never feels forced or artificial. Well, I admit those shots of the mining wastelands that open the picture are a bit overdone, though they are also quite beautiful. And they really set the mood, which Loden exploits to the maximum degree with her performance, her direction, her vision. It feels like she is telling us, as directly as possible, this is what it’s like to be a woman who has stopped fighting for her agency, place, and rights because it is all just too exhausting. But the movie is not exhausting—indeed, the cold precision of the vision is so well realized that it is almost energizing.
The second, Mr. Dennis as he apparently wants to be addressed, is a low-level career criminal and disgusting pig, though he dresses self-consciously in jackets and ties, with a natty salt-and-pepper mustache. He is played awkwardly but competently by Michael Higgins like he’s shooting for the drive-ins. Wanda simply falls into the orbit of this guy. He steals cars and rips off people at every chance, but Wanda tends to ignore it, evidently preferring not to think about it and capable of putting it out of her mind with great force. Way late in the game she acts surprised. “Hey,” she says, “what are you getting me involved in here?”
Nothing good—a bank robbery plot with side dish of scripted home invasion and terrorism. Wanda goes along because she doesn’t know any better and doesn’t want to be alone. She doesn’t want to start over, even though she’s been with this creep for no more than a matter of weeks. Do we question her torpor and seeming lack of motivation and assign her some blame or responsibility? I suppose, yes, in a way we do, or I did. No doubt many viewers (including non-viewers put off by the descriptions who don’t want to look at it and haven’t) write her off entirely. I’m often impatient with her decisions and ways of going about things, but I keep thinking I understand the place of depression this is coming from.
Wanda is about as bleak and downbeat as can be, but somehow it never feels forced or artificial. Well, I admit those shots of the mining wastelands that open the picture are a bit overdone, though they are also quite beautiful. And they really set the mood, which Loden exploits to the maximum degree with her performance, her direction, her vision. It feels like she is telling us, as directly as possible, this is what it’s like to be a woman who has stopped fighting for her agency, place, and rights because it is all just too exhausting. But the movie is not exhausting—indeed, the cold precision of the vision is so well realized that it is almost energizing.
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