At #48 on the 2022 S&S list, this is the next one down that I haven’t seen, and is another addition to the list from a female director.

This isn’t what I expected it to be. From the capsule description, I thought it was going to be a kind of Wendy and Lucy style movie, about a woman living on the margins of society and the indignities and perils of that life. And it opens up with coal mining, and a house full of crying children, so it seems at first that it is doing that. But then it takes a bit of a left turn, and turns into a Breathless-inflected movie about a woman who falls in with a kind of assholish guy who wants to do a bunch of crimes, and pulls her into them despite her obvious lack of enthusiasm.

But — perhaps because director Barbara Loden is a woman and Jean-Luc Godard isn’t — the focus here isn’t on the crimey asshole guy, but on the woman. It’s her life we see before they hook up, and it’s through her eyes that we watch their relationship. And it’s the character of Wanda that makes this movie so fascinating.

I’m going to spoil the movie comprehensively here, but I’m going to put it behind a spoiler tag. Even though this came out in 1970, you’ll only reasonably have had a chance to see it relatively recently — it first got a DVD release in 2006, got a restoration in 2010 (the story of which is absolutely fascinating: The negatives were recovered a day before they would have been trashed, among other implausibilities), and has only really been widely available (through Criterion) for the last five years.

Okay then, spoilers ahoy.

Early on in the movie, she makes her way to a divorce/custody hearing; she’s late, and doesn’t seem particularly bothered about that. When asked for her comment, she’s like, yeah, fine, let him divorce me, I’m not going to argue, and the kids are probably better off if they go with him, because I’m awful.

Which on the one hand, throughout the whole movie she has a kind of passive affect, and is generally just disengaged from her surroundings, and some reviewers latch on to that kind of coldness and disengagement. But Loden plays her with more depth than that, and it’s clear that there’s a level at which she does care about things, and there’s a clear unexplored trauma that has her convinced that she’s awful, doesn’t deserve anything better, and can’t do anything right.

And this is where the relationship with the asshole guy is so compelling, too. Because he really is terrible, he’s a pathetic loser and he treats her like garbage, controlling and possessive and cruel. But… he also sees the value in her, and she seems to feed on that very small bit of warmth.

When he finally sets up for his big crime, robbing a bank, this really comes to the foreground, with him giving her a real motivational speech about how she can do this, about how she’s more capable than she thinks she is. And then there’s a kind of layered tragedy to the resolution of that: She does in fact fuck up, and takes a wrong turn, and gets pulled over by a cop, and is late arriving to the scene to play her part… but also his plan was flawed and the police come and kill him. If she hadn’t screwed up, she might have been pulled into the firefight, but since she doesn’t have all the details of what happened, it’s clear that she thinks her mistake got him killed.

And unlike Breathless, this movie then goes on to follow Wanda as she continues on her drifting life, now even more disengaged and clearly grieving in a way she can’t express. The last scene, of her at a crowded table in a bar with a bunch of people who are having a good time while she’s very clearly not, is just a gut punch.

Excellent movie, and I’m glad this is widely available and getting the recognition it deserves.