Wanda is a film worthy of obsession.
Director Barbara Loden’s 1971 movie about a lonely woman wandering from bar to bar, man to man, trying to escape a sordid existence, was the filmmaker’s only effort. Before making Wanda, Loden was an actor, then married to Elia Kazan. After Wanda, she died young, at age 48. Her movie was largely forgotten until a restoration by UCLA Film Archive.
In this scene, Wanda asks a sewing factory boss for her old job. He declines.
I first saw Wanda at the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis. Then I saw it again on Criterion, then a third time on Criterion, then I read Nathalie Leger’s excellent Suite for Barbara Loden. If you haven’t seen Wanda, this appreciation from Richard Brody at The New Yorker will give you a sense of the movie’s tone.
In 1972, Loden appeared on the Mike Douglas show at the invitation of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. One of the questions Douglas asks Loden references her husband’s reaction to her ambition: “How does he feel about you making your own film?”
Ugh.
Take the time to watch Wanda, a film John Waters called one of the best “feel-bad movies ever.”
