Wanda

I suppose its heretical to compare Barbara Loden's self-consciously austere Wanda (1970) to TV sit-coms like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and That Girl, but there is a meaningful connection.  Both of the sit-com involve a young woman who finds herself, more or less, alone in the world -- she has "to make it on her own" as the theme song tells us.  Wanda starts with a similar situation -- in the first ten minutes of the movie, she gets divorced and surrenders custody of her children.  Alone and penniless, she must fend for herself in a hostile world.  The TV shows were comedies and, at times, Wanda is very funny in a wholly dead-pan way.  At the time, these shows were produced, a man alone was nothing remarkable -- men in TV shows and movies were supposed to be proud, rugged loners.  But a woman without a man, without children, and without any sort of family was a strange anomaly, worthy of the sort of close attention afforded by a TV series or a feature film. 

Wanda is supposed to be scrupulously documentary, but, in fact, the micro-budget film (made for $115,000 and shot on 16 mm) is expressionistically fanciful.  In the first couple shots, we see Wanda bunking on her sister's couch -- the home has a towering heap of anthracite about 100 feet outside the front door.  An old hillbilly lady sits at her window watching the looming mountain of black coal fingering her rosary and, when people step out the front door, they're standing in some kind of open pit coal mine.  (I can't believe any house stood that close to an active coal mine -- it's a bit like Rotwang's  house in Metropolis, a Gothic gingerbread hut plunked down in the middle of a huge, gleaming city.)  In one scene, Wanda walks aimlessly across a vast desolate field of black, shattered anthracite -- she wears an incongruous white pants suit, all the better to stand out against the nightmare desolation where she is strolling.  Where is she going?  Why has she chosen this path?  Won't her white clothes get smudged by the coal dust?  The landscape is obviously symbolic, an image for the desolation in which Wanda finds herself trapped.  Later, she appears in court where she tells the astonished judge that her kids are better off with her soon-to-be ex-husband.  The kids and all her ex-husband's kin are sitting in the courtroom.  (Of course, the Judge would not allow the children to be present for a hearing of this kind.)  During her court appearance, Wanda has her hair in curlers under a frowsy scarf.  Throughout the film, Wanda is shown to be conscious of her appearance -- she likes to look well-groomed although she has trouble with her huge mane of blonde hair.  Thus, her appearance in court in curlers, although metaphorically effective, doesn't make any sense in realistic terms.  When Wanda and her criminal companion stop in an open field near a stream, a couple of dogs come up to nuzzle them and a local teenager is flying a radio-controlled plane in circles overhead -- the plane, I suppose, represents the idea of flight and liberation.  Later, when one of the barroom hustlers with whom she associates tries to rape her, the incident occurs in a brilliantly red convertible -- the camera luxuriates in the velvety red upholstery in the car.  This is symbolic or ecstatic realism -- in the last three or four shots in the film, the imagery seemed strangely familiar to me and I searched my memory for where I had seen this kind of thing before:  desolate wastelands, extreme long shots, grainy images of the inside of bars shot in natural light, homely extras obviously recruited in taverns and local street-corners, the "pathetic fallacy" -- that is, visionary-looking landscapes.  Then, it came to me -- the pictures looks like some of Werner Herzog's films, particularly his documentary-style movie shot mostly in central Wisconsin, Stroszek.  Several of the actors in Wanda seem to be partially mentally retarded.  One scene is filmed at a religious theme park called Holyland a place with a miniature Jerusalem and catacombs where a tour guide points out niches where martyrs were buried.  These elements are not conventionally realistic -- they are like the dowdy tourist attractions in the last scene of Stroszek in which a baffled highway patrolman says:  "We've got a suicide on the chairlift and the chicken won't stop dancing." 

After her divorce, Wanda goes to a bar, gets picked-up by a traveling salesman, who is only too anxious to ditch her the next morning -- she gets a Dairy Queen cone for her troubles.  Wandering around a Latino neighborhood, she takes refuge in a Spanish-language theater where someone loots her purse when she falls asleep.  When she goes into a seedy bar to use the toilet, it just happens that a robbery is underway -- the bandit is a well-dressed man with a scar transecting his face:  he wears tinted glasses and chomps on big cigars.  The man takes Wanda with him and they steal a few cars and rob some convenience stores -- all of this is shown in a grim, matter-of-fact way.  (Loden intended the film as a rebuke to 1967's Bonnie and Clyde.) The criminal slaps Wanda now and then, tells her not to talk, and bullies her -- but he also buys her clothing to make her look pretty.  (Of course, the fundamental incongruity in the movie is that Wanda is played by Barbara Loden, one of the screen's greatest beauties -- she took the role of the Marilyn Monroe figure on Broadway in Miller's After the Fall.)  The crook plans a big heist.  But he and Wanda are totally inept.  (She ends up getting stopped by cop on the street and has to timidly ask directions from him as to the whereabouts of the bank she and crook -- she calls him Mr. Dennis -- are going to rob.)  The bank heist is a ludicrous failure.  Mr. Dennis gets gunned down by about thirty cops who rush to the bank after his idiotic plot (it involves a dummy bomb and hostages) goes wrong.  Wanda is so nondescript that she just walks away from the scene.  Another guy hustles her in a bar and, then, tries to rape her in a quarry.  She fights back, escapes, and we see her crying where she is hiding in a scrubby, dark forest.  Wanda walks into a nearby town.  There's a bar in which a fiddler seems to be playing variations on "The Orange Blossom Special".  She stands outside for awhile, afraid to enter.  Then, a showy brunette in a red dress invites her into the tavern.  In the last shot, we see Wanda sitting among a bunch of mountain-folk drinking beer as the fiddler and his combo play an archaic-sounding dance tune.  The camera freezes the shot and we get to admire her perfect features and tower of blonde hair in the granular-looking air of the dim smoky bar captured on 16 mm film. 

Wanda has no music and very little dialogue.  At one point, Wanda says:  "I don't want anything."  Mr. Dennis replies:  "If you don't want anything then you won't have anything.  And if you don't have anything, you might as well be dead.  You're not even a citizen of the United States."  This more or less states the theme of the movie. A couple of times, Wanda says:  "I'm just no good."  The movie resounds in your memory and is better recalled than watched.  What makes the picture remarkable, of course, is Barbara Loden's performance -- she's completely enigmatic, utterly passive, an empty vessel onto which we project our emotions.  I think it must be a rare feat of acting to appear so utterly vacant. 

The Criterion disk has several interesting features including a very uncomfortable interview on the Dick Cavett Show.  Loden is imperturbable, again eerily vacant, and totally oppositional.  Everything Cavett says, she opposes or objects to.  When Cavett asks her about her childhood and suggests that she was very poor, she replies that she wasn't poor at all.  He tells the audience that she grew up in Appalachia.  "No, no, it wasn't Appalachia," she says.  "It was the mountains in North Carolina."  Then, she makes a distinction no one else has ever made.  "Appalachia is Scranton and East Pennsylvania.  I'm from the mountains of North Carolina."  Loden was married to Elia Kazan.  She performed with Ernie Kovacs and did slapstick comedy on his show.  Wearing a gorilla mask, she was one of the Nairobi Trio.  Wanda is a remarkable first film -- it's not a masterpiece by any means, but it shows real imagination and craftsmanship.  When Cavett notes that she had a crew of only three, she says -- "It's much easier to make a movie that way.  You don't need twenty people standing around doing nothing."  Tragically, she died in 1980 at 48 after a long battle with breast cancer.  She is a precursor Kelly Reichert -- who knows what she might have accomplished had she lived as long as Werner Herzog.