Wanda
First screened in August 2013 / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2024
Director: Barbara Loden. Cast: Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins, Dorothy Shupenes, Peter Shupenes, Jerome Thier, Marian Thier, Anthony Rotell, M.L. Kennedy, Milton Gittleman, Lila Gittleman, Joe Dennis, Jack Ford, Rozamond Peck, Frank Jourdano. Screenplay: Barbara Loden. Twitter Capsule:
A patient character study; onset of "plot" sneaks up on you. Has a documentary's gaze. Loden excels on both sides of camera.
VOR:⑤
Indispensable, bottom-up vision of US, though not that far up. 70s auteurist classics rarely had women at their center, much less calling the shots.
I don't have anything profound to contribute right now about this amazing movie. Neither Wanda nor Wanda has almost any peer that I can pull up in U.S. cinema or in popular U.S. storytelling, and Loden's camera choices and structural ideas are as compelling as her premise and performance. There you go. That's quite a lot, and it's also all I've got.
The thing that's weighing on me after this second watch is the number of decades when almost nobody knew about Wanda, and even fewer had actually seen it. We know that revivals and "rediscoveries" happen all the time, and we know that the work has only just started of recuperating differently marginalized and actively suppressed cinematic perspectives—whether of sidelined filmmakers or of glaringly absent milieus and characters. We're used to this. But it's good sometimes to get unused to it again. It's good to get uselessly, naïvely, breathlessly angry and think about how shocking it is that Jeanne Dielman all but disappeared for decades. That Bush Mama, ¡Alambrista!, and Losing Ground are easy to have never heard of, and that it was even easier just a handful of years ago. That most of the L.A. Rebellion films are still so hard to see and some are lost, or may as well be. That Girlfriends and Nighthawks and Hester Street spent decades as obscurities, as did Cassavetes, as did Akerman. That Claudine seems back in hiding as I write this.
That a vision as potent and slippery and muscular and singular as Wanda's was here all this time, except it was barely anywhere for most of that time. It's moved up on lists that matter to movie people, its Criterion package is a treasure, its vitals seem good right now. But still, you mention it to almost anyone outside a Film Twitter-y bubble, and for reasons for which they bear no blame, they go, "Who? What? Never heard of it." But I could look out my downtown apartment window right now and probably spot at least five strangers who could quote Godfather scenes in their entirety, and maybe one who can recite the whole script. And everybody knows what Rosebud is and what Travis Bickle says into his mirror, even if they've never seen the films.
Wanda should be famous like that. The character herself seems to think she's nothing, in a way that's both eerie and poignant. Then, through an amalgam of accident, miscalculation, amorality, savvy, and raw need, she winds up as something—something to herself, and something to somebody else, though it's hard to say just what. And just as that's happening, a man flaps his sorry wings, and she's nothing again. Nothing. And another man catches the scent and treats her instantly and violently like the nothing he's certain she is. And then she's caught like a dandelion spore by a bargoer who doesn't know what's up or who this is but senses that Wanda needs a seat, a drink, maybe a slice of orange, an "Are you okay?" Wanda, mothlike, alights in this grungy booth, nibbling on what she's been given to nibble, eyes and ears a mile away, protected (surrounded?) for a moment, somewhere in the chasm between something and nothing.
Everybody should see this, should see what this looks and feels like, in its sandpapery refusal of sentiment. Should see how the film and its central artist get us to this place, this image. People should adulate, they should debate, they should Discourse, they should whatever. But attention should be paid.
"But, it is being paid," some reader is thinking. "Chill, sweetheart. People talk about Wanda all the time now." And this reader is right! Many people do. Wanda, once all but lost, seems to be safe, where so so so many comparable artworks aren't, and won't be, ever. But this best-case scenario is still a campfire story. It's just wild that this movie had to wait so long for that hearth, after so long in the vacuum, in the dark and crackling woods. And that we have to worry, have to remember always, even as we relish Wanda, that one crux (the crux?) of its story is that whatever and whoever was once a ghost could always and easily become a ghost again. Grade:A–
Awards:
Venice Film Festival: Pasinetti Award (Foreign Film)
