Wanda (Loden, 1970): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 6.10pm
I wrote about this extraordinary movie for the Guardian here when it was screened at the London Film Festival in 2011. This 35mm screening is is part of the Wanda and Beyond season at BFI Southbank. Full details here. Tonight's presentation will include an extended introduction to the season by Elena Gorfinkel.Time Out review:
A remarkable one-off from Elia Kazan's wife. Shot in 16mm and blown up
to 35, it's a subtly picaresque movie about the wanderings of a
semi-destitute American woman. Directing herself, Barbara Loden manages to make the character at once completely convincing in her
soggy and directionless amorality, yet gradually sympathetic and even
heroic. After a desultory involvement with a bank robber, to whom she
becomes attached despite his unpredictable temper, Wanda botches
everything - having agreed to drive a getaway car for him - by getting
lost in a traffic jam; and our last glimpse of her is back on the road,
being picked up in a bar. The film is all the more impressive for its
refusal to get embroiled in half-baked political attitudinising; it's
good enough to make one regret that the director/star produced nothing
else before her untimely death from cancer.
David Pirie
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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