THE GIRL WHO LOST HER DOG

Wendy Carroll is on her way to Alaska when she passes by a small town in Oregon. Coming all the way from Indiana, Wendy is hoping to find a feasible job in the Last Frontier. To save money, Wendy keeps track of all of her spending and she sleeps in her 1988 Accord every night with her dog Lucy. One early morning, a Walgreens security guard wakes her and tells her to move her car out of the parking lot. Wendy then tries to start her car but the beat-up automobile does nothing other than make a loud noise. The old man was kind enough to help push her vehicle to the side of the street. He even gives her directions to the nearby mechanic and grocery store. With an empty bag of dog food in her trunk, Wendy decides to take a risk. After tying Lucy on the bike rack outside the store, she nervously puts a couple cans of dog food inside her bag and walks without paying. A self-righteous employee catches her instantly, and insists on calling the police on Wendy. By the time she pays her fine and return to the store, Lucy, her only companion, is gone.

That is the opening of director Kelly Reichardt’s new film Wendy and Lucy. For the rest of the movie, Wendy is shown to be looking for Lucy around the small gloomy town while she also tries to get her car fixed. To be honest, there is not much drama in this 80-minute feature. But then drama is not what Kelly Reichardt has in mind for Wendy and Lucy. Inspired by the public’s insensitive attitude towards Katrina survivors, Reichardt’s intention is to make a film to show how a person lives when he/she has no money, no support and no safety net to fall back on. Wendy and Lucy takes a backseat from manipulating the audience’s emotions to show the difficulties encountered by Wendy from a bystander’s point of view. Like the smugly moralistic store clerk who thinks Wendy should not own a dog if she cannot afford dog food, the tendency to judge someone based on fragmented details is grossly prevalent in our society.

While Kelly Reichardt has acknowledged the influence of Italian Neo-realism and New German Cinema has on Wendy and Lucy’s subtle social commentary, the film’s minimalist approach is comparable to the style of French director Robert Bresson, whose films dissects the nature of human suffering in the most non-dramatic manner. Actress Michelle Williams’s introspective take on the character Wendy exposes the kind of vulnerability and loneliness that is also seen in Bresson’s tragic protagonist in Mouchette. Wendy and Lucy is nowhere near as bleak as most of Bresson’s films, but the sadness and longing it unravels is no less profound.

Wendy and Lucy opens at the Angelika Film Center on February 20.