SUITE FOR
BARBARA LODEN
Nathalie Léger.
Translated by Nathalie Lehrer and Cécile Menon.
Dorothy, a publishing project $16 paperback (128p) ISBN: 978-0-9973666-0-0
“I believe there is a
miracle in Wanda,” wrote Marguerite
Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed.
“Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and
action. Here that distance is completely eradicated.”
A film more famous in
our time than in the year it was released, Barbara Loden’s sole filmed work as
writer and director went from an affront to American feminists—how dare a woman
filmmaker represent a woman as a passive pawn in her own life!—to a smash
reception at the 31st Venice International Film Festival, where it took Best
Foreign Film honors—as the only American entrant accepted that year. Honestly,
it might as well have been a foreign film right here in the USA for all the
attention it received in the 1970s.
Loden was an actress who
was famous if you knew who she was. She was the leggy, semi-clothed blonde
bombshell sidekick to sophisticated sketch and improvisational comedian Ernie
Kovacs on his critical darling of a revue show. She won a Tony Award in 1964
for playing a thinly disguised take on Marilyn Monroe in an Arthur Miller play.
She was a featured actress in several of second husband Elia Kazan’s films (eg,
Splendor in the Grass). Her Method
acting was learned at the Actors’ Studio while she was a teen-aged dancer at the
famed Copacabana nightclub. This was a woman of formidable ability and
negligible self-confidence who, paradoxically, married two high-powered men
(her first husband was film and television project distributor Larry Joachim, a
major player in the early years of television) and left each of them yearning
for the strength to control her.
French author Nathalie
Léger is introduced to this subject of obsessive interest by a writing
assignment: Create a composite entry for Loden and her single outing as a
writer/director for inclusion in a film encyclopedia. Léger tells us that she
got the instruction from said editor, “No need to put your heart and soul into
it.” Sounds to me as though this was not the editor’s first go-round with Mme Léger.
That was possibly the most wasted breath the editor had ever used to form
speech. “I was trying to be as objective and rigorous as possible. To describe
and only to describe, in as few words as possible,” says Léger of beginning her
research. Instead, this encyclopedia entry blossoms into a combination personal
essay, critical assessment of film, director, and star, and miniature biography
of a minor player in the film world with a major talent.
At the very most, I’d
expect someone charged with writing an encyclopedia entry to visit a
film-school library, see if the subject’s only film was available in some
format and give it a watch, at the extravagant end spend the money for an
international phone call to an easy-to-locate colleague of Loden’s who was
still living at the time. Léger flies to Pennsylvania’s coal country, the setting
of the film; contacts film scholars in the USA as well as famous French star of
the same era as Loden, Isabelle Huppert; haunts the late Loden’s son, who
possesses “twenty-five boxes” of material on his mother and (not unreasonably
to me) wants to know what specifically or even generally Léger is looking for;
and can’t articulate to any of them precisely what it is she is seeking. I have
the sense that, even as this beautiful and intimate mixed portrait of Loden,
Wanda, and Léger was going to press, she wouldn’t have been able to articulate
precisely what the purpose of her journey was except in terms of its result.
Loden and Léger are each
on a road trip towards some sort of epiphany. Loden’s, as Wanda, is going to be
fraught with the usual sort of misery and pointless, purposeless suffering that
is the lot of the intellectually ungifted when they come unmoored from whatever
habits and relationships they’ve tangled themselves into. Léger’s road trip is
guided by that savior of the directionless, GPS:
Sky. The ocean
floor. The earth’s gravity field. Lines, measurements, a shape, a time. What
the experts call the figure of the earth. I don’t want to know any more. I
allow myself to be guided; I don’t understand the organized collusion of data
transformed into electromagnetic waves that come crashing mathematically into
the rental car’s black box to dictate my itinerary. I’ve muted the sound;
heading into this unknown country I rely only on the image of the infinite
ribbon unspooling on the GPS screen. No obstacles, a marvelous, illusory
continuity, the perfect representation of stupidity—what others might call an
acceptable representation of reality. “The magic box,” the mechanic had said. I
have heard that the GPS is altering our perception of our position in space and
the way we travel from place to place. The very notion of an itinerary is
problematic nowadays; some people go so far as to believe that everything,
including time and emotions, can be localized. It seems to be becoming
increasingly difficult to accept that we don’t always know exactly where we
are, and by extension it is becoming increasingly difficult to know exactly
where we are.
Where in the world is
Léger? She’s lost; or she’s not found, anyway, not by the spirit she seeks so assiduously
that, instead of knocking out two hundred fifty words or so on a minor player
in the film world, she knocks on time’s doors and bangs her shins on the
invisible furniture in the dark theaters where Wanda isn’t playing.
It is a very good film,
if you’d care to watch its 102 minutes. Cinema vérité isn’t everyone’s cup of
tea, and while the ample-for-its-day budget of $110,000 is spent so that it
shows on camera the seedy underbelly of the American Dream is pretty much
intact and uncomfortably familiar. The upholstery is different colors and the
TVs have flat screens. All of Wanda’s
acting is done by Loden and her man, Michael Higgins; as Mr. Dennis, he’s the
latest loser to tow her long behind him. He’s enough of an improvement over the
husband she didn’t so much leave as simply drop and forget to pick up that
Wanda makes every attempt to stay with him as his petty little control tactics
become more and more desperate (throwing a new pair of slacks out the car
window because “no slacks when you’re with me,” and “no curlers, they make you
look cheap; do you wanna look cheap?”) as his unrevealed criminal plan begins
to crack open. But for Wanda this is the big time, this is freedom from the
hideous coal-mining burgs of her entire life, from kids she doesn’t care about,
from people who know her and despise her. Author Léger relates this barren
freedom to her own mother’s life, and does so in a way that makes clear what
those 1970s American feminists were testy about: At every turn, these women
exist, actually exist, only in
relation to the plans and persons of their men.
The bleak truth is that
many women in 2016 are in the same boat. Wanda’s
cult classic status among the most sophisticated cinephiles does not make the
subject matter more comfortable for today’s energetic and ever-more-successful
activists to watch. And Léger, by writing a beautiful film critique mixed with
a biographical sketch and a patch or two of memoir, has used artful image
juxtapositions to create the unsettling but unignorable truth behind all of
these stories. (October 2016)
Purchase Suite for Barbara Loden HERE.
