I was almost going to miss this understated film. It wasn't Wim Wenders' name that eventually lured me - I just thought I'd give it a chance, despite the trailer being underwhelming and the reviews I've spotted online - plainly inane. But such is the (US) culture this film comments on, leading to the heroine's isolation. She converses with absent characters, having been abandoned without explanation, including by her mother. The ones she meets on the road offer shallow philosophies, want to exploit her, or are grotesque - albeit not as much as David Lynch's Otis and Buella from The Return, to which I initially made a parallel. The things here are not as dreary, motionless and absurd. The heroine, while engaging in some desperate acts the camera doesn't show, doesn't lose herself; instead, she flows. She does so with music. This is obviously an allusion to the story of a lost singer (who wanted to be found, according to her lyrics); there's another found song the heroine plays over and over again, about a man reaching out to a woman - Roving Woman is quite concerned the woman from the song gets the message. The whole soundtrack is great, with the blues being hinted through a couple of chords in the beginning: Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark was the night, cold was the ground". I thought that would be it, thinking: I wish they'd make this a blues movie, in order to get it out of the roving woman. Eventually things would build up and the whole song would be played...
I don't want to spoil the story, but this is a subdued, subtly building film about the twilight (if not the dark night) and the crossroad of the soul.
I saw an interview with the director, who said that popcorn-eating audiences were unprepared for it at whatever festival it played in North America. He was quick to insure himself against offending, saying that a film should always entertain (while I thought that popcorn over this film would feel more like hail). One needn't be polite while ignorance gathers momentum. Ignorance is dehumanising and potentially violent - so the roving woman says she felt relieved she was invisible and nobody could find her. She eventually connects with someone - to depart again. "I'm just a woman, so I drive.". She laments the ex who abandoned her in a pursuit of fame; she meets a literally "invisible" man who peruses pictures of another man and says, "This one looks as if he is already famous. A common man."
While normality nowadays seems to be the luxury to which we aspire, we always have that invisible thread of connection, ever so quiet.
It should be mentioned that Wim Wenders' amazing film, Soul Of A Man, is partly about Blind Willie Johnson. It's also about Nehemiah "Skip" James, another famous bluesman who just "skipped" a few decades of his life and career - but was eventually found, and even recorded an album during the 60s folk-blues revival. Parallels could certainly be made with Wenders' feature films as well. The acting in Roving Woman is amateurish, but since this is a film about absence, this could strangely be to its credit: the characters are sketched, almost ghoulish, giving us room to identify or project our mood.
Roving Woman is any woman. The man she meets who wrote songs to someone who doesn't exist, is any man writing to himself.
