Wanda

Wanda refuses to embody any of the female images she comes across in the film...You see, just because she can't articulate her desires, doesn't mean she doesn't yearn for something more.

"Realism" doesn't entirely do justice to the world Wanda inhabits, which, for all the grit and grunge of its bars and diners and factory floors, is also a world of startling everyday beauty.

Writer-director-actor Barbara Loden's 1970 feature has a wonderful, hard-won sense of everyday rapture.

I Wanda, Wanda who...who-oo-ooh, who...who wrote the book of love? Probably not Barbara Loden, who struck the mother Loden of bleakly pathetic romances with her groundbreaking and brilliant 1970 film.