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Wanda (1970)
In writer/actor/director Barbara Loden's intelligent,
bleak, raw and original low-budget grainy, documentary-styled character
study and road movie - her sole directorial effort and the first
feature length film to be written, directed and acted in by a female
- but almost entirely neglected:
- the circumstances surrounding the grim and disconnected
life of lower-class, unambitious, uneducated and dim-witted Wanda
Goronski (Barbara Loden), living in a coal-mining, Rust Belt area
of Pennsylvania, where she had drunkenly deserted her coal-miner
husband (Jerome Thier) and two very young children
- the divorce court hearing before a judge (M.L. Kennedy)
where the husband complained about Wanda: "She doesn't care
about anything. She was a lousy wife, she was always bummin' around,
drinkin'. Never took care of us, never took care of the kids. I used
to get up for work, make my own breakfast, change the kid. You come
home from work. She's lyin' around on the couch. The kids are dirty.
The diapers on the floor. Sometimes the kids is outside, runnin'
around, nobody watchin' 'em"; Wanda who arrived late and was
still in her curlers, lost her children after she had been accused
of being a bad mother; she passively acquiesed and told the judge
in a monotone: "Listen judge, if he wants a divorce, just give
it to him....(the children) They'd be better off with him"
- as a drifter (unemployed, destitute, and amoral),
she slept in a dark movie theatre showing the Spanish-language film El
Golfo (1969), and awoke, realizing that the money in her wallet,
pickpocketed from her purse, had been emptied
- the scene of her wandering into an almost-empty bar
after closing to use the restroom and clean up, and her meeting with
nervous petty criminal Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins) behind the
bar, who was in the midst of a robbery, with the bartender tied up
and gagged on the floor; almost immediately, migraine-suffering Dennis
began to treat her abusively at a restaurant:
"Wipe your mouth!", and after sleeping with her, he barked: "Don't
touch my head!" and ordered her to get them some food: "Well,
come on, make it snappy, I'm hungry!"; when she returned appearing
lost, he slapped her across the face: "Hey, stupid!" - and
then angrily complained that the three burgers she brought had too
many garnishes; she finally responded minutes later to the slap: "What
did you do that for? That hurt!"
- the scene of the two lovers on the run drinking a
bottle of bourbon and beer near their stolen car at a garbage dump,
and Mr. Dennis' continued abuse when he criticized penniless Wanda's "terrible"
hair and her non-chalant attitude: "You're stupid...You don't
want anything, you won't have anything. You don't have anything, you're
nothing. You may as well be dead. You're not even a citizen of the
United States" - she answered flatly: "I guess I'm dead,
then"
- suddenly a remote-controlled, motorized model airplane
was heard buzzing overhead, operated by a family nearby; in a futile
effort, Dennis jumped up on top of the car roof and waved his arms
at the plane, like an impotent King Kong, taunting it to come closer
- the sequence of the planning of a bank heist at Third
National Bank in Scranton, PA in which Wanda was forced to participate
by Mr. Dennis, and vehemently complained: "I can't do this";
he demanded as he held her shoulders in front of a mirror, and spoke
into the back of her blonde-haired head: "You listen to me.
Wanda. Maybe you never did anything before. Maybe you never did.
But you're gonna do this!"
- the scene of the hostage-taking of bank president
Mr. Anderson (Jack Ford), and the typing up of his family in their
home, in which Wanda took an active role as an accomplice (afterwards,
Dennis quietly complimented her at a car window as he handed her
the getaway car keys: "You did good! You're really something" and
she smiled back)
- in the botched heist, the co-dependent and dysfunctional
Wanda lost her way in a getaway car, and when she finally arrived
(wearing a fake pregnancy outfit), she was cordoned off on the sidewalk
as she watched the post-robbery activity at the bank; after the failed
robbery, the aimless Wanda ended up in a bar, where she watched a
TV report about the robbery, the dismantling of a fake dynamite bomb
at the Anderson home, and Mr. Dennis' eventual death (after being
shot by police during a shoot-out)
- the final sequence in another roadhouse bar/restaurant,
where a friendly woman asked Wanda on the sidewalk: "Honey,
are you waitin' for somebody?" - she kindly took pity on Wanda,
and invited her to a raucous upstairs party in progress; the film
ended with a freeze frame on Wanda's lost, contorted and lonely face,
unnoticed and isolated as she unhappily sat in the midst of everyone,
holding a beer, nibbling on a sandwich, and smoking a cigarette (was
she reflecting on her loser life or not?)
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