The New Hollywood cinema of the early 60s and 70s and European auteur cinema of the same time is teeming with drifter figures – characters who drift, aimlessly, with no discernible reason nor social belonging, usually without money too. Barbara Loden shows us a female figure like that for the first time in her 1970 film WANDA. The film is the only one she directed. In the era of Coppola, Penn, and Scorsese, a female director was a rarity, and in the famous films of this era it’s hard to find a multi-layered female character. Wanda, played by Loden herself, has left her husband and children and is searching for something and it’s unclear where it will lead her. Her yearning for freedom is palpable in how she has drifted through the world ever since – without a home or job, never staying in one place for long, yet with a diffuse yearning to belong. Her decisiveness seems to have been sapped from her after her escape, she doesn’t know how to get started in her situation, and the encounters with the world don’t give her any ideas either. Every man who wants to can buy her food, she goes to the hotel room with everyone, and when a bank robber makes her an accomplice, she follows him, naturally. What makes it heart-wrenching is primarily Barbara Loden’s intense acting. Wanda looks like a slightly deranged Barbie (who can’t wear pants on the bank robber’s orders), is always trying not to disturb, and doesn’t have an ounce of self-esteem: “I’m just no good,“ she says, when she’s asked about herself. But beneath the surface there are emotions, thoughts, and desires simmering – without an outlet. WANDA is less an explicitly feminist film than a film before feminism, a portrait of a world and an atypical character who still finds the notion of female self-empowerment alien.

Susanne Stern (INDIEKINO MAGAZIN)

Translation: Elinor Lewy