TRIBECA 2020 - My Wonderful Wanda
TRIBECA 2020Directed by a Swiss filmmaker Bettina Oberli, My Wonderful Wanda opens with a scene on a bus filled with Polish women travelling to Switzerland for work. The camera captures them as they sing in unison a traditional Polish tune, thus subliminally planting a hint that what’s about to happen isn’t necessarily manufactured out of whole cloth, but rather a part of a shared and fundamentally tragic human experience known only to those who ever had to leave their homeland to provide for their family.
At least superficially, this is what Oberli’s film is about. It tells a story about Wanda (Agnieszka Grochowska), a Polish woman who leaves her two sons in the care of her own parents and goes off to a foreign land to work as a caregiver and a housekeeper to a wealthy Swiss family. She lives on the premises in rather barren quarters, looks after the bedridden patriarch, cooks, cleans and acts as a kind of familial glue to a collection of individuals who – despite their blood ties – have very little in common with one another. Above all, Wanda is a provider of warmth and kindness in a household void of emotions. However, things change dramatically when she becomes pregnant by Josef (André Jung), the seventy-year-old in her care.
This is where My Wonderful Wanda becomes increasingly difficult to categorise and review because as events escalate and the layers of normalcy and familiarity are peeled away one after another, the entire movie changes its character as well. Oberli starts off her film with what looks like a desire to satirize the wealthy classes. In a way, the early acts of the film are vaguely reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s Happy End with its ruthless approach to ridiculing just how mind-bogglingly entitled and callous rich people can be. This is utterly fascinating, though not exactly new. Nevertheless, the film delicately suggests a directionality to the narrative, one pointed squarely at uncomfortable mayhem and intellectual horror in its opening scenes. Oberli focuses her gaze on Wanda being treated by her hosts with a mixture of politeness and condescension, a fact that Wanda is prepared for. But then the filmmaker keeps prodding and jabbing with continued instances of well-mannered mistreatment and well-articulated xenophobia, as if to confirm that – yes – she is predominantly interested in crafting a Haneke-esque horror to dress down the richest castes of her society.
Interestingly however, the minute this vector of the narrative is defined, the film turns into an out-and-out farce. Admittedly, this subversion of expectations may send some viewers into a tailspin, but it is nonetheless undeniable this manoeuvre is performed with immense precision. Oberli effectively shifts the tone of My Wonderful Wanda from one inspired by Haneke to one evoking the spirit of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie. The movie becomes a whole new kind of horror: one which is decisively humorous at the same time. This sudden tonal shift could be read as a sign of indecision on behalf of the filmmaker, but it works, especially in the context of what’s to come.
This is because, as it is eventually revealed, these distinctly bold choices in tone and atmosphere are working in service of something more than just a satirical takedown of the rich. My Wonderful Wanda harbours a profoundly humanist and tragic thematic core which only comes to the foreground towards the end of the film. Only then does it become clear that those tonal references to Haneke, Buñuel, and by extension to Ruben Östlund, are merely tools in the hands of a humanist filmmaker. Oberli isn’t interested in exploiting her characters, but she needs to engage in exploitative behaviour to show that everyone in this story – Wanda, her hosts, her host’s adult children, as well as Wanda’s own parents – are slaves to their own pent-up frustrations and need to overcome them to come into their own.
Therefore, while it is easy to fixate on the film’s superficial qualities and file it as a descendant of Haneke and Buñuel’s respective legacies, My Wonderful Wanda is much more than a synthesis of its inspirations. It is an unnerving study commenting on class relations and the immigrant experience which also successfully challenges a whole host of national stereotypes. But its mission is to engage in a discourse about basic kindness, frailty of the ego and tenacity of the human spirit while having the viewer follow along a veritable rollercoaster ride which is equally unsettling as it is comical.
