Barbara Loden (1970)

In 2012 Sight & Sound’s decennial poll of critics included in the top 100 films just two directed by women.  Ten years later, there are eleven[1] and the greatest film of all time is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975).  Text introducing Laura Mulvey’s piece on the new chart-topper in S&S (Winter 2022-23) excitedly declares that ‘Things will never be the same’.  That may well be the case but the results of the latest poll, including Jeanne Dielman’s rapid ascent to number one, were predictable.  The cultural traction of ‘diversity’ has increased apace since 2012.  S&S has expanded its polling to reflect this and to include, as well as film critics, ‘academics, distributors, writers, curators, archivists, and programmers’ (a grand total of 1,639 voters).  Each voter nominates their top ten films.  The film with the most votes is the best film ever.  This time around, the pressure to nominate at least one film made by a woman must have been – for many old hands as well as new voters – irresistible.  So Jeanne Dielman, the top such film in 2012 (in joint thirty-sixth place), is now the top film tout court.  Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999) retains second spot on the distaff side, rising (from joint seventy-eighth in 2012) to seventh place overall.

Of the other nine films in question, all debutants in the list, six place fiftieth or higher.  The inclusion among these of Wanda is doubly striking.  It’s the only feature film made by Barbara Loden, who also wrote the screenplay and plays the title character.   At the time she made Wanda, Loden – who died in 1980 at the age of forty-eight – was married to Elia Kazan.  They wed in 1963, soon after Loden had appeared in small roles in two of Kazan’s films, Wild River (1960) and Splendor in the Grass (1961).  For much of his long life (1909-2003), Kazan was an admired and laurelled film-maker.  Twenty years after his death, his work is nowhere to be seen in the S&S roll of honour (even the expanded version that includes the top 250 films) while his second wife’s sole directing feature has made it into the professional cinephile canon.

Wanda Goronski (Loden) is a wife and mother in contemporary rural Pennsylvania.  She’s unhappy and unsuccessful in both roles.  We first see her waking up on a couch at the home of her sister (Dorothy Shupenes) and brother-in-law (Peter Shupenes) – Wanda’s staying there after walking out on her husband (Jerome Thier).  It’s the day of their divorce hearing, for which Wanda turns up late.  In court she agrees to her husband’s request for a divorce and voluntarily relinquishes her rights to their children.  ‘Voluntarily’, with its implication of an act of will, is hardly the word, though:  Wanda is abjectly acquiescent.  She loses her job at a sewing factory.  She has a one-night stand with a man who, at the second attempt, succeeds in abandoning her.   Next, she drifts into a picture-house, and is robbed after falling asleep during the movie.  Penniless, she goes into an almost deserted bar to use the toilet, and starts chatting to the middle-aged man behind the bar.  He seems alarmed by her arrival and the reason soon becomes clear.  Norman Dennis (Michael Higgins) doesn’t work in the bar – he’s a thief, in the process of robbing the place.  Wanda, who doesn’t know where her next meal is coming from, isn’t easy for Dennis to get rid of.  He books into a motel, where they sleep together. He says consistently unkind and insulting things to Wanda but next morning steals a car, taking her on the run with him.  She doesn’t have anywhere better to go.

Chronologically speaking, this film appeared halfway between Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Badlands (1973), and evokes both.  (Far more famous in their time than Wanda, these two are also absent from the S&S charts.)  Loden’s law-breaking duo on the road, along with the media coverage they attract, obviously brings to mind Arthur Penn’s and Terrence Malick’s more dangerous pairings.  There’s an echo of Bonnie and Clyde too in an episode in which Wanda and Mr Dennis (as she continues to call him) visit the Holy Land USA theme park in Connecticut, where Dennis meets up with his evangelical Christian father (Charles Dosinan), to whom he’s uncharacteristically polite and respectful.  The scene recalls the brief reunion (and last goodbye) of Bonnie and her mother in rural Texas in Penn’s film.  As an eccentric road movie – the story of a crackpot, fateful journey – Wanda is reminiscent of Badlands, despite a different balance of power between the leading man and woman.  Whereas psychopathic Kit in Badlands is always in the driving seat, Wanda has to take over at the wheel when Mr Dennis has a splitting headache.  But Malick’s Holly and Loden’s Wanda, although the former is a more defined and studied portrait of affectlessness, share a lack of independent agency – a kind of aboulie.

It may be symbolic that her aimless protagonist’s name is a homonym of ‘wander’ but Loden, who based her screenplay on a newspaper article about a woman’s involvement in a bank robbery, supplies no backstory for Wanda or explanation of her personality.   At one point, she tells Dennis that she’s never been any good or done any good.  When she says this, Wanda doesn’t seem to be asking for sympathy or reassurance that she’s wrong.  Her tone isn’t defiant or even matter of fact.  She just says the words and you believe that she means them.  She’s capable of hurt reactions to Dennis’s verbal and occasional physical abuse but its impact on her seems momentary.  It’s ironic that someone so feckless thereby becomes involved in her companion’s intentional life of crime (though his motives and background are also unexplained).  Wanda becomes Dennis’s accomplice in a hostage-taking and his lookout for a related bank robbery, in which he is shot dead.  As with her divorce hearing, Wanda arrives late for the bank heist.  She merely watches as police arrive on the scene.  Later,  she sees a TV news report on what happened.  She hitches a ride with a soldier (Frank Jourdano) to get out of town.  When he tries to have sex with her, Wanda shows unusual strength of purpose in fighting him off and running away.  It’s dark when she fetches up near a roadhouse where a pleasant younger woman (Valerie Mamchez) invites Wanda in.  The woman and her friends ply her with food, drink and cigarettes.  In the film’s closing sequence, as the rest of the group talk and laugh together, Wanda sits silent in their midst.  She seems preoccupied but it’s hard to imagine she’s deep in thought.

Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker (in 2007) that ‘If there is a female counterpart to John Cassavetes, Barbara Loden is it’.  I don’t know the Cassavetes oeuvre well enough to argue but Wanda struck me as different in two important ways from the Cassavetes films that I do know.  While both directors make use of claustrophobic hotel/motel rooms and cityscape, Loden also places her characters in larger outdoor geography – most memorably in an early sequence, a long take in long shot, that shows Wanda as a tiny figure in white, walking in a Pennsylvania landscape that is huge, rocky and relentlessly grey, except for the odd tree.   (Wanda’s white clothes here anticipate her weirdly bridal appearance when – on Dennis’s instructions and with his cash – she buys a new outfit and hat in a shopping mall, while he breaks into vehicles in the car park.)  Wanda shows a variety of bizarre Americana, not least the religious theme park with its stations of the cross, catacombs etc.  Loden uses Wanda’s lack of orientation – her going-along-for-the-ride – to make ports of call like this one seem quite natural developments in the narrative.

The other signal difference from Cassavetes is in what Loden appears to expect from performances.  Although she too favours a highly realistic style of acting, she’s relatively uninterested in generating tension and momentum through the dynamic that develops between actors in the course of an extended scene together.  There were times when I wished Loden had been more interested in achieving this.  The naturalism of her own acting is exemplary but one or two of the Wanda-Dennis exchanges drag.  That more of them don’t is probably thanks to Michael Higgins.  Compared with Loden, Higgins can be almost theatrical but he energises scenes as a result.  His character’s querulous misanthropy is even funny occasionally (when, for example, Wanda says that she’s only trying to be friendly and Dennis bluntly replies that ‘I don’t like friendly people’).  It’s also amusing and effective that Mr Dennis, who nearly always wears a suit and tie, looks both unremarkable and, given his line of work, distinctive.  (It’s less effective that Dennis often seems so poor at his job – he’s easily overpowered at the start of the hostage-taking:  Wanda’s intervention gets it back on track – that you can’t easily believe he’s a career criminal.)  I don’t think Wanda’s great but I was very glad to see it.  More than fifty years on, what sadly proved to be a one-off still has the feel of film-making trying to do something different.  Barbara Loden is intent on truthfully describing behaviour rather than on dramatising situations.  In her film’s best moments, though, she succeeds in doing both.

18 February 2023

[1] That’s including Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by the husband and wife team of Alexandr Hackenschmied and Maya Deren.