Wanda (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wanda (1971)—written, directed and acted in by Barbara Loden—is one of the truly good American films of the Seventies.

The newly unemployed, soon-to-be-divorced Wanda (Loden) ignorantly takes up with a robber (Michael Higgins) who is unstable and tyrannical.  Theirs is a pathetic (occasionally funny) relationship, but Wanda never has to assist the robber in his stealing until he finally insists on it apropos of a bank.

The cannily written film has to do with what the lives of working-class people—Wanda, not the robber—sometimes become, and with the slow, harmful creep of irresponsibility.  The movie concludes with a freeze-frame shot of Wanda sitting in a tavern and at a dead end, not enjoying the conviviality of the strangers who have invited her to drink with them.  With her deep performance, Loden proves she understands the character she is playing; likewise with Higgins.

Loden, by the way, was married to Elia Kazan.  One wishes she could have made at least one more film before she came down with a fatal cancer in 1978.

The 1964 Jean-Luc Godard film, A Married Woman, held my attention for about an hour of its 94 minutes but then became dreadfully dull.  The very pretty Macha Meril enacts Charlotte, who spends quality time with both husband and lover but lacks a veritable devotion to either.

The most interesting thing about the film is the Village Voice review it inspired after being re-released in 2015 in New York.  To Godard, asserts Calum Marsh, “A sort of mass delusion . . . had begun to seize the young [in Europe], manifesting itself in historical ignorance and prevailing trivialities like TV and fashion magazines”—and thematically this is what A Married Woman is about.  I respect this, and I respect that Godard’s visual poetry, though sometimes too obvious in its meaning, frequently hits the mark.  But a relatively short picture shouldn’t be this talky, shouldn’t be a slog.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Une Femme Mariee