[Film Review] Wanda (1970) and Party Girl (1995)

A brace of female-directed debut features, both are about an aimless young woman trying to map out her “self-concept” in a disorienting built environment. Barbara Loden’s WANDA is a starkly downbeat portrait of its eponymous drifter’s dead-end existence, and remains as her sole feature-length film; 25 years later, Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s first feature PARTY GIRL stars indie-queen Parker Posey as its titular heroine, a NYC fashion plate and party hostess, who must come to terms with her new-found vocation as a librarian.

Although they can be homogenized for their thematic focus, both films’s backdrops and tones cannot be more disparate. WANDA is a grainy, guerrilla-style road film maundering in rural eastern Pennsylvania. Wanda (Loden) is a helpless doormat, none too intelligent, unmoored from life like a floating weed. She might just as well be the American cousin of the homeless Mona in Agnès Varda’s VAGABOND (1985), but devoid of the latter’s Gallic steeliness and blue-sky dignity. Wanda is fragile, mostly defenseless, she has very limited resources. Being dragooned into becoming an accomplice of a small-time bank robber Mr. Dennis (a spivvish Higgins lording it over with a memorable force of ferocity), who is both physically and emotionally abusive to her, it is not a Bonnie and Clyde affair, Wanda lucks out simply because of her ill-equipped sense of bearings, that is the irony of being chosen as a getaway driver.

Loden’s script dives down to the basest point, aka. through Wanda’s utter abjection, like the toxic bonding with Mr. Dennis, her incorrigible passivity and none-the-wiser resignation, in order to elicit audience’s maximal sympathy towards a naive, kind, innocuous but ultimately reactive woman who can be easily swallowed whole by the cruel world around her. And were the film to be directed by a male director, flaks of exploitation and gendered ulterior motives would be pelted down upon him, ergo WANDA’s success is pivoted on, firstly, its perspective originated from Loden’s own life, who is accorded the first-hand verisimilitude of Wanda’s plight and dilemma, and secondly, Loden’s central performance, tendering Wanda’s soul-baring vulnerability on a plate, and then letting it savagely ravaged by the life as we know it. Yet, Wanda is also unconventionally strong, she has no scruples of leaving her two kids to her ex-husband and isn’t guilt-tripped by her maternal obligation, for better or worse, she is pragmatic and a living litmus test of the sterner sex’s banal cruelty.

Nobody wants to watch a dashed American dream from a nonentity, to say nothing of it is about a dowdy, subservient member of the distaff side, so WANDA’s mere existence becomes a rare outlier in the USA independent cinema soil and its significance only surges in the process of time. The fact that Loden, a triple threat who shows her promising, directorial finesse with an affinity for John Cassavetes, but fails to score another feature-length project (she died in 1980 at age 48 from breast cancer before working on a new feature film) speaks volumes about the difficulties facing a female filmmaker at then, it also makes one wonder whether being Mrs. Elia Kazan has helped her or not, career-wise.

Mayer’s PARTY GIRL flourishes within a self-contained megalopolis counterculture biosphere. 24 year-old Mary (Posey) has an existential crisis after being thrown in jail for organizing a rave party, after which she impulsively accepts the challenge from her righteous godmother Judy (von Scherler, director Daisy’s mother) to work as a library clerk, which is easier said than done, for starters, she must master the Dewey Decimal System. Meantime, she is harassed by his deadbeat boyfriend Nigel (Schreiber), head over heels for a handsome Lebanese street food vendor Mustafa (Townsend), hard up to pay rents, so it may take a while for her to navigate her rudderless life onto the right track, but unlike Wanda, she will get there, this is a promise Mayer’s film cheerfully keeps.

PARTY GIRL is exceptional for its high octane energy, edgy fashion statement (Mary’s wardrobe selections are truly dazzling!), a killer soundtrack plus a more-than-competent cast. Posey is a live wire endowed with a magnetic ferocity, she can be funny, serious, charming or goofy without ever losing that layer of self confidence, her brio and élan is always incandescent on the screen. Also leaving a strong impression is Díaz’s Leo, Mary’s temporary roommate who is bent on deejaying in the hottest club owned by René (Mitchell). A 19-year-old Díaz calibrates Leo’s greenness with a modicum of pride and recklessness, watching the scene where he accosts René to introduce himself, Leo’s awkward self-consciousness is a flex of Díaz’s superlative performative bent, putting a grandstanding Mitchell right at her own place.

Mayer’s film boldly obfuscates the incompatibility between one’s trendy style and immanent capacity, a studious, bookish librarian (which proves to be far more useful in solving quotidian problems, like categorizing vinyls, seeking information on a particular subject…) can also be a fashion-forward “it” girl off duty, and Mary’s story is both inspiring and super funny to watch. PARTY GIRL augurs the rising of a metrosexual filmmaker who does not lack the funny bone, so after 6 more features, which fail to make any splash, Daisy von Scherler Mayer has been toiling away in directing TV series for almost a decade. However, compared to Loden, she can assuredly receive a pat on the back and consider herself lucky amid the decades-long failure that Hollywood has been foisting on women directors.

referential entries: John Cassavetes’s FACES (1968, 8.0/10); Agnès Varda’s VAGABOND (1985, 8.5/10); Lisa Cholodenko’s HIGH ART (1998, 7.2/10); Christopher Guest’s WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (1996, 7.9/10).

Title: Wanda

Year: 1970

Country: USA

Language: English

Genre: Drama, Crime

Director/Screenwriter: Barbara Loden

Cinematography/Editor: Nicholas T. Proferes

Cast:

Barbara Loden

Michael Higgins

Jerome Thier

Charles Dosinan

Jack Ford

Rating: 7.9/10

Title: Party Girl

Year: 1995

Country: USA

Language: English

Genre: Comedy, Romance

Director: Daisy von Scherler Mayer

Screenwriters: Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Harry Birckmayer

Music: Anton Sanko

Cinematography: Michael Slovis

Editor: Cara Silverman

Cast:

Parker Posey

Guillermo Díaz

Omar Townsend

Sasha von Scherler

Anthony DeSando

Donna Mitchell

Liev Schreiber

Nicole Bobbitt

Simon Verhoeven

John Ventimiglia

Becky Mode

Rating: 7.2/10