United States, 1970
Directed by Barbara Loden
With Barbara Loden (Wanda Goronski), Michael Higgins (Norman Dennis)
She is a nobody: the camera does not catch her readily; instead it pans on a dreary mining landscape till a few, nondescript houses appear; it comes into one of them, glancing at an old woman sitting still despite the kid fussing around her, watching a wearied woman try to calm down a baby, getting a glimpse on an unfriendly man slamming the entrance door and finally panning on a couch where the disheveled woman wriggles out of the linen. Later, she would just be a moving little white stick walking through the vast expanses of the industrial and agricultural fields making this corner of Pennsylvania running, a woman gotten lost in the depth of field and the very long shot.
She is a no-hoper: without money but always with rollers in her hair and a cigarette in her fingers she arrives late at the court for her divorce and is stunningly unwilling to contradict her angry husband and to claim any right over their children; she fails to keep a job at a garment factory because she is too enervated, and she is even too daft to comprehend her pay slip; she just cannot handle life and its demands.
Wanda Goronski is a woman on the fringe of the American society, without volition or vibrancy but with a rather vulgar outlook and a vapid personality. She is an awkward presence drawing misfortune easily: picked up by a horny man who gets rid of her in the middle of nowhere or getting robbed in a movie theater. She stumbles across a fidgety, surly man in a bar; she does not realize this bespectacled sturdy guy has just stolen the bartender; she absent-mindedly follows him.
The wandering inside a dull town and its environs of a silly woman becomes a road trip that gets two lonely people closer. Wanda and the man she keeps calling Mr. Dennis strike up a strange, tough relationship; she seems to view him as an anchor for her drifting vessel while he is willing to consider her a partner to be educated and supported – she never tries to walk away from him while he orders her not to look cheap and to behave as he wants. Scheming a bank heist could have changed things; instead of running away, Wanda, with reluctance, plays the part Norman Dennis wants her to play.
That would not be enough to make his job a success and a special system of alarm he did not reckon with would allow the police to arrive on time. The petty thug dies in a brief gunfight, leaving Wanda alone. She just pick up the desultory wandering she has started before meeting Dennis, becoming the victim of a rape attempt and then ending up in a roadhouse, gulping down a hamburger at a table full of bawling, guffawing and quaffing guys entertained by a raunchy girl to the tune of a deafening folk music band.
The camera this time does not lose its sight on her; on the contrary, it focuses on her sulking, dumb face so intensely that the image freezes; the audience is left to contemplate that emblem of feminine tragedy for quite a time, compelled to face Wanda’s person before she fades in black, that is, before she fades into oblivion, carried away farther into the depressing, narrow-minded, primitive side of the American society.
Shot with a modicum of staff in 16 mm (the celluloid film would then be aggrandized to 35 mm for its release), relying on puny dialogues and brutal situations, “Wanda” feels as precarious as the life of the titular character. It was not the first movie in the United States to be made by a woman, but still the first to be at the same time produced, written and directed by a woman on her own, who also plays in it (in an amazing, poignant performance). Barbara Loden was relatively well-known, thanks to the roles she played for Elia Kazan (who became her husband). She took a brave decision by shooting “Wanda”, a trailblazing effort for the women inside the indie part of the American cinema and a remarkably risky, shocking narrative experience, seeking to capture the deep authenticity of the lead character.
The film, unlike a Kazan movie or any film with social and political ambitions, does not explore the social background and challenges of the lead character; it just shows her depressing environment and her psychological and intellectual limitations in the clearest, even crudest terms. Such people – fragile, defenseless, disadvantaged women – exist; the film humbly purports to examine how one of them can survive, without relying or illustrating any theory, not even a feminist discourse.
The portrait is harsh but not devoid of earnest sympathy; like Dennis, the film is not blind to Wanda’s charm and her ability to change. But she remains too unlucky in a male-dominated society looking for trustworthy principles and conformist attitudes. Wanda is a nuisance for the husband of her sister (she was the woman looking after the crying baby), an irritant for her own husband, an enigma for the judge, an idiot for the boss, a toy for many men – although things are more complicated in Dennis’ case. Still, she keeps living on, walking on, carrying on even if she is in really bad company; she is a struggling, living, fascinating person that does not stand as a formula or a piece of evidence.
She is unfit for the movie narratives the audience is used to. She resists the social film’s vow to assert truths though tragedy; she eludes psychological analysis and moralistic portrayal, busy as she is with the need to enjoy the moment or to find solutions – this is a behavior-oriented and spontaneous character; she is obviously no femme fatale and no monster – she is not a Bonnie to the derisory Dennis’s Clyde; her move turns the film into a road movie that offers no enhancing lesson and no useful revelation and just boils down to a very bad crime story leading to other crimes – rape and perhaps prostitution in a roadhouse. Wanda, in the final analysis, is her own tragic self, a truly stubborn presence upsetting the audience, demanding the highest attention and, if not mercy, at least respect for her very existence, handled with more or less dignity on the verge of nothingness.