Barbara Loden wrote, directed, produced, and stars in WANDA
WANDA (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Friday, June 3, 12:30, and Tuesday, June 14, 6:20
Series runs June 3-16
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
“If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, then you’re as good as dead,” Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) tells Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) in Wanda, which appropriately kicks off Film Forum’s two-week “Genre Is a Woman” festival on June 3. The first theatrical feature written, directed, produced by, and starring an American woman, Wanda is a raw, naturalistic road-trip movie about an emotionally vacant woman who walks through life in a kind of stupor, wandering into situations to avoid being alone yet still trapped in an unrelenting alienation. Loden, who won a 1964 Tony for her portrayal of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall — the play was directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan, whom she would marry four years later and remain with through her tragic death in 1980 — doesn’t try to turn Wanda into a feminist antihero, but she does take all the power away from her, making her completely dependent on other people, primarily men, an excellent counterpoint to Loden herself, who has all the power. Staying on her sister’s (Dorothy Shupenes) couch in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country, Wanda is almost zombielike as she slowly heads to court in curlers and a housecoat and lets the judge award custody of her two children to her soon-to-be-ex-husband (Jerome Thier). “I’m just no good,” she mumbles. Broke and apparently with no faith or hope in her future, she proceeds to get involved with some sketchy losers, including Mr. Dennis, who takes her on a minor crime spree that is a far cry from Bonnie and Clyde. All along the way, she rarely has anything of any interest to say to anyone; the only time she speaks clearly and definitively is when she explains that she likes onions on her hamburgers.
Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) takes Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) for quite a ride in WANDA
Shot in a cinéma vérité style by documentary cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes, Wanda is a riveting and infuriating exploration of the death of the American dream as the 1960s come to an end and the country reexamines itself, not necessarily liking what it sees. Apathy competes with melancholy as Wanda is unable and unwilling to take control of her life, dressed in the same white outfit and carrying the same white pocketbook throughout nearly the entire film, but she is more disconsolate than angelic. Much of the film is improvised and most of the characters are portrayed by nonprofessional actors or people who just happened to be in the area, like the scene in which Mr. Dennis and Wanda encounter a family flying a remote-control model airplane. (Higgins would go on to make more than fifty films, including The Conversation, The Stepford Wives, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan.) Coming on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement, Wanda is about a pouty sad-sack who barely ever changes emotion, always wearing the same blank stare. It’s not that she’s promiscuous, adventurous, or even unpredictable; she just is. You desperately want her to take action, to care about something or someone, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s almost as if Loden is setting the groundwork for such future films as Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, which feature such strong, decisive female characters as Alice (Ellen Burstyn) in the former and Iris (Jodie Foster) in the latter, who at least attempt to take matters into their own hands; elements of Wanda can also be found in Aki Kaurismäki’s Match Factory Girl and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Wanda would end up being Loden’s only film as writer and director; she died in 1980 of cancer at the age of forty-eight. Named Best Foreign Film at the Venice International Film Festival, Wanda is screening in a recently restored 35mm print on June 3 and 14 at Film Forum; “Genre Is a Woman” continues through June 1 with such other woman-directed features as Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel and Point Break, Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, Doris Wishman’s Bad Girls Go to Hell, Katt Shea’s Poison Ivy, Mary Harron’s American Psycho, Penelope Spheeris’s SubUrbia, and Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Award-winning husband-and-wife documentarians D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus have been collaborating for forty-five years, working on films about such subjects as Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign (The War Room), Carol Burnett (Moon over Broadway), soul music (Only the Strong Survive), pastry chefs (Kings of Pastry), and Elaine Stritch (Elaine Stritch at Liberty). For their latest film, Unlocking the Cage, they spent three years following animal rights lawyer Steven M. Wise, the president and founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, as he sought to establish “personhood” for several chimpanzees in order to free them from their caged existence and move them to more acceptable animal sanctuaries. Wise and his team, Natalie Prosin and attorneys Elizabeth “Liddy” Stein and Monica Miller, scour the internet searching for chimpanzees to represent as well as sanctuaries where the animals can be released. (The Nonhuman Rights Project focuses on great apes, elephants, and such cetaceans as dolphins and whales because of their autonomy, intelligence, and emotional capacity.) The concept is fascinating, and the film hits its high points when Pennebaker and Hegedus show some of the chimpanzees interacting with humans in compelling ways, watching television or figuring something out on a computer. Unfortunately, far too much of Unlocking the Cage deals with often murky legal discussions and courtroom arguments that drag on and on.
“Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy,” Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) tells her rather boring husband, Fred (Cyril Raymond), as he returns to his crossword puzzle one night. “How can I possibly say that?” she then thinks to herself. “‘Don’t hurry. I’m perfectly happy.’ If only it were true. Not, I suppose, that anybody’s ever perfectly happy, really. But just to be ordinarily contented, to be at peace. It’s such a little while ago really but it seems an eternity since that train went out of the station, taking him away into the darkness. I was happy then.” In David Lean’s Brief Encounter, one of the greatest romantic films ever made, Laura, a housewife and mother, can’t stop herself from falling for dapper doctor Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard), who is also married. As they explore a potential physical relationship, Laura is wracked with guilt, especially as she keeps bumping into nosy gossip Myrtle Bagot (Joyce Carey). But the two potential lovers are so drawn to each other, filling the holes in each other’s lives, that they consider risking all they have for just one more moment together. Winner of the 1946 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Brief Encounter is told in flashback in Laura’s voice as she goes over every wonderful and terrifying detail in her mind while contemplating whether to spill the beans to the generally oblivious Fred. Written by Noël Coward based on his 1936 one-act play, Still Life, the film features terrifically subtle performances by Johnson and Howard as the daring couple; you can’t help but root for them, despite the possible consequences. Lean, who earned the first of his seven Best Director Oscar nominations for the heartbreaking film, keeps things relatively, well, lean, getting right to the point in less than ninety minutes; he would go on to helm such sprawling epics as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India before his death in 1991 at the age of eighty-three. Brief Encounter is screening May 15 and 16 in Film Forum’s one-week, thirteen-film tribute to the one and only Coward, consisting of movies he wrote, appeared in, or were based on his writing, from such beloved classics as Blithe Spirit, Private Lives, and Cavalcade to such lesser-known fare as The Astonished Heart, Tonight Is Ours, and Boom!
