Intimate but unsentimental, the story reveals its meaning obliquely, in the expressions flickering across Wanda's face and in slow, long-distance shots of our heroine inching her way across the bleak landscape - a metaphor for her life's passage toward a different life.Īlthough Wanda won the award for best foreign film at the Venice Film Festival, not everyone loved it. Made for a paltry $115,000 - $750,000 in today's money - Wanda's raw style finds Loden leaning in to her taste for Andy Warhol and documentary realism. Now, Wanda is an unforgettable movie but not an especially alluring one. She tries to resist, but, as usual, lets events carry her along.
Dennis - played by Michael Higgins - a gruff, mustachioed crook who hits her, orders her not to look "cheap" and dragoons her into helping him rob a bank. Possessed of little money and fewer plans, she picks up a traveling salesman in a bar - he sleeps with her and dumps her - beginning an apparently aimless journey that will lead her to other bars and other dire men. Wanda begins amid the slagheaps of Pennsylvania coal mining country, where Wanda Goronski - played with eerie authenticity by Loden - is being divorced for being a lousy wife and mother, a charge she freely admits. It boasts a legion of champions, including Yoko Ono, Isabelle Huppert, John Waters and Rachel Kushner, and it inspired a splendidly idiosyncratic book, Suite for Barbara Loden, by the French writer Nathalie Léger.
Based on the true story of a crime gone wrong, Wanda - which is just out in a restored version from the Criterion Collection - is now reckoned a cinematic landmark.
The film is called Wanda, and it was written and directed by its star, Barbara Loden. But today, it's overshadowed by another film from that year that almost nobody saw, a gritty story about a drifting woman. Back in 1970, for instance, the big movie was Patton - a box office hit that won the Best Picture Oscar.
It is the dream of every neglected artist that their work will be redeemed by posterity. Barbara Loden wrote, directed and starred in Wanda, a 1970 film about a drifting woman.
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