Thoughts on Wanda

In October 2021, I watched Barbara Loden’s 1970 film Wanda on Criterion, a long lost movie that got restored in 2010, and I thought it was going to be this introspective indie gem about a lone woman figuring her way through life in tough blue collar worlds, but I found it meandering and boring. I appreciated the cinema verite look of it trying to look like a documentary, or following this woman who is pretty much a passive loser who abandons her family only to take up with lowlife men on the road, but I found it boring, and tuned in and out. I couldn’t really get a grasp on her character. She didn’t have to be some feminist hero, but at least I wanted to know what was going on more with her than just watching her as an observer. It just followed her going from leaving her husband and giving up custody of her kids, getting fired, falling asleep in a movie theater and getting robbed, then just happening to walk in on a bar robbery and taking up with the guy, and end up being an accomplice in a bank robbery, hooking up with other loser men, then at the end just seen in a crowded bar smoking, with not really a definitive end to her story, but the movie just ends there.

I think from the arthouse hype I thought this would be more deeper or groundbreaking, but it felt like it was trying to be this experimental art film, like indie when it was underground, that was written/directed and starred Loden, who was an actress who played Warren Beatty’s sister in Splendor in the Grass, was married to Elia Kazan, and only directed this film and later died of cancer at just 48 in 1980. I liked the intention of it, and that it was trying to look scrappy and rough, but I mostly found tedious.