“Wanda” is back. The influential 1970 portrait of a housewife experiencing an existential crisis has been newly restored and will return to theaters in a limited run. Written, directed, and starring Barbara Loden, the drama took home the award for Best Foreign Film at the Venice International Film Festival.
“If he wants a divorce, just give it to him,” says Wanda (Loden) in a new trailer for the pic. Her husband has brought her to court to expound on her offences — he comes home from work to find the kids dirty and unsupervised while Wanda lies on the couch. According to Wanda herself, she’s “just no good.”
The “listless young mother in Pennsylvania coal country … drifts away from her domestic prison and shacks up with perhaps the least glamorous outlaw in cinema history, Michael Higgins’ cantankerous ‘Mr. Dennis,'” the film’s synopsis details. “A deeply personal work by Loden, herself a child of Appalachia, with an extraordinary clear-eyed expression of dead-end despair, a life-marred document of a scuffed, sad, left-behind working-class world. Without question, one of the greatest American films of the 1970s.”
“Wanda” marks Loden’s only credit as a director. Her other acting credits include “Splendor in the Grass,” “Wild River,” and “The Frontier Experience.” She died in 1980.
The restoration of “Wanda” will debut at the Metrograph in New York on July 20 with a national roll out to follow.
