Wanda

Recently released on DVD, Wanda (1971) is the only film directed by Barbara Loden, wife of director Elia Kazan. A review extolled the film's realism and called it a forgotten American classic. On the basis of this praise, I bought and watched the film. It is an experiment in realism that deliberately flattens any evidence of style or perspective. It follows the experiences of a young woman (played by Loden) whose life is falling apart. Her name is Wanda. She is separated and then divorced from her husband, is unemployed, gives up her children to her husband with nary a complaint, and turns tricks when she needs income. She comes across in the film as profoundly depressed, if not worse, and the film's method is to take every opportunity to focus on that depression. In one scene the camera follows Wanda from a great distance as she walks through what appears to be a strip mining area. (She is on her way to ask her father or grandfather for money). Without apparent edits, the camera follows the small figure of Wanda for much longer than one would anticipate, until the effect becomes uncomfortable if not irritating. The result is a sense of the ennui and despair that this woman feels. Stylistically, the film seems amateurish, though apparently this was Loden's intention.

Loden's acting style complements the style of the film. She rarely shows any expression or emotion. Usually her face seems frozen in a paralyzed rictus. Only as she becomes involved with a supposedly notorious bank robber and finds herself given a purpose does she show expression. Others in the film seem to have been pulled off the streets, chosen for their complete ordinariness. When the bank robber (known in the film only as Mr. Dennis) takes a banker's family hostage, his wife and two daughters look as if they have just escaped from a Laundromat or bowling alley.

Loden's method of direction seems to be to give her actors a general sense of what she wants them to do and then to have them improvise. Nothing seems deliberately scripted or determined. In a strange sense the film seems not to care about itself, to suffer from the same despair and ennui as its main character.

The bank robber Mr. Dennis dresses in business clothes and initially treats Wanda with cruelty and contempt. Only gradually does he seem to come to like her. He shows few of the stereotypical characteristics one would associate with a ruthless criminal. He is more reminiscent of a sit-com dad from the 1950s, with a smidgen of Peter Parker's editor thrown in for good measure, than he is a lowdown criminal. He enjoys reading accounts of his exploits in the newspaper. He seethes with constant exasperation. He is always on the lookout for the police. He seems to choose his targets at random, though the climactic bank robbery he plans out with some care. (It is climactic only in comparison to the rest of the film and is presented with the same indifference and lack of tension as every other scene). Mr. Dennis speaks with a heavy Wisconsin type of accent, and it is difficult to place the film geographically. Given the strip mines and the banjo music at the end of the film, it must be placed somewhere in northern Appalachia.

Wanda is completely flat, so much so that you long for it to end. It shows us a woman completely a victim of environment and circumstance. She takes the one opportunity she finds to escape, to find some purpose or meaning for her life, and when it fails she sinks back into the same wallow of despair in which the film began.

Is this film a landmark, an influential but forgotten classic? These are big claims for a film that struggles so incessantly to minimize and deaden its subject. Yet in the final scene, with its emphasis on Wanda's once again expressionless and empty face, the film offers one of the darkest cinematic conclusions imaginable. It is an early feminist film and, obviously, a film made by a woman director in a time when there were virtually no women directors at work anywhere.