Wanda

Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) is a character study that tells a woman’s story in pictures in a plain style similar to Ernest Hemingway’s simple declarative sentences.

Wanda Goronski (Loden) is less furnace (goron) than wander-go-round. The viewer first sees her asleep on a couch in her married sister’s front room. We learn that Wanda left her working class husband and two small children. But her ‘leaving’ is just a fact. It is possible that she wandered into marriage and motherhood as aimlessly as she wandered out of it.

But Wanda is not wicked, wanton or willful; nor is Loden making a ‘feminist statement’. What comes across as Wanda’s native cluelessness lets Loden’s camera impassively watch and record life as it happens to her. The best way to see this movie is straight out of the can in a theater. MP’s comments contain no plot ‘spoilers’.

A handheld 16mm camera follows Wanda as she picks her way through a northeast Pennsylvania industrial moonscape in the fall of 1969 in the coal-mining area around Scranton. Our desolate angel sets out through this corner of the post-World War II industrial rustbelt, the home of the first Silent Majority of President Richard M. Nixon. But this film is a pioneering cinema verité exploration of character. It is not a documentary. Loden makes no attempt to hazard a political statement.

Wanda’s story arrests one’s attention as it unspools in an improvisational style. This unsophisticated young woman of average intelligence at best and limited education, with no particular interests, appetites or ambition and a narrow horizon of options, drifts into the wide world with a dollar cadged from a derelict senior culling coal bits from slag. She seeks male companionship if not love; she tries to attach herself to men she meets. She drinks and smokes, but less apparently for her own pleasure than because this is what men do.

Loden shows facts rather than acts of sex, such as Wanda in bed and a double-knit polyester-clad older man on the morning after. Wanda seems less interested in men or sex than in doing what she thinks women do to be men’s companions. She lets men take advantage of her and they are casually abusive, perhaps less shockingly so in her time than in ours. Yet Wanda persists. She finds a companion in Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins), a career felon who allows her to call him ‘Mr. Dennis’. Loden and Higgins were the only professional actors in this cast of more than two dozen people.

Dennis is a wishful-thinking loser with Big Plans, migraines and a short fuse. He takes charge of Wanda and slaps her to get her attention; but he lets her be his companion. There is chemistry between these two left shoes because they are oddly alike. Wanda accompanies Dennis but is not introduced when he visits his disapproving father (Charles Dosinan) at a vernacular Christian theme park complete with catacombs featuring Daniel in the lions’ den and martyrs (Holy Land USA, actually in Waterbury, Connecticut, is now closed). When the driver Dennis had counted on bows out of the bank job, he makes Wanda his accomplice.

The movie is simply and beautifully shot, but the scenes incident to the bank robbery scheme at the movie’s center are astonishingly good, realistic, and unlike most movie heist scenes. Much of the acting feels improvised because the actors do unexpected, natural things that enhance both the reality of the scenes and a viewer’s empathy for their characters.

Wanda submits. The sense of reality that Loden’s cinema verité conveys is heightened further because the film and its colors, shot in 16mm and converted to 35mm for theatrical release (and restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive), look the way this era appears in photographs and home movies. There is no music besides what is incidental to scenes being shot, such as movie music in a Hispanic cinema, Holy Land ‘hymns’, or live bluegrass in a road house.

Loden’s film brings to mind John Cassavetes’s later A Woman under the Influence (1974) a character study of Mabel (Gena Rowland), a complex woman beloved by her simple working class husband Nick (Peter Falk) but emotionally unable to function as a wife and mother.

Wanda is a brilliant independent film by a woman director who, like Cassavetes, came from a stage and film acting and directing background and filmed with nonprofessional actors. Loden unfortunately died of cancer before she reached age 50 in 1980 without having completed another feature film.