Wendy and Lucy

TS Eliot once wrote of the French poet Baude­laire that he con­jured ​‘the poésie des departs, the poésie des salles d’attente’. It wasn’t so much the jour­ney as the lim­i­nal spaces between them that cap­tured Baudelaire’s imag­i­na­tion – the pos­si­bil­i­ties, dreams and regrets that places of depar­ture set before the soul.

In Wendy and Lucy, Kel­ly Reichardt plays with the flip side: the agony of sta­sis, and the lone­li­ness that comes from being stuck between a neb­u­lous here and a dis­tant there.

Michelle Williams is Wendy, a young drifter pass­ing through the Pacif­ic North­west on her way to Alas­ka. Unlike Christo­pher McCan­d­less, hero of Sean Penn’s Into The Wild, Wendy is an old-fash­ioned eco­nom­ic migrant, head­ing West to find work, not just her­self. Lucy is her dog, her only friend and com­pan­ion, but after their car breaks down, a series of unfor­tu­nate twists sees them part­ed, bring­ing Wendy’s life of per­pet­u­al motion to a sud­den, jar­ring stop.

Work­ing from a John Ray­mond short sto­ry, Reichardt has assem­bled a ten­der and inti­mate dra­ma that deft­ly touch­es on sub­jects rang­ing from America’s class divide (in which prin­ci­ples are the priv­i­lege of the wealthy), to indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion and self-iden­ti­ty. ​“You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?” asks a friend­ly secu­ri­ty guard, but Wendy has no home, no his­to­ry, no identity.

Reichardt’s great strength as a direc­tor is her empa­thy, and her feel­ing for Amer­i­ca as a bewil­der­ing place. Hav­ing lived and worked in New York for 20 years, she brings an outsider’s per­spec­tive to America’s heart­land, and finds it a strange and intim­i­dat­ing place.

That it’s also graced by moments of qui­et human­i­ty is cen­tral to the appeal of her films. Her char­ac­ters are vul­ner­a­ble and imper­fect (how you react to Wendy may hinge on whether you think her trou­bles are self-inflict­ed), but they are also dig­ni­fied and real, capa­ble of love and – per­haps the hard­est thing of all – self-sacrifice.

Shot almost entire­ly out­doors in nat­ur­al light, with under­stat­ed per­for­mances and a sound­track com­posed from the noise of an ever-present rail­road (as both a metaphor of imper­ma­nence and a sub­tle nod towards Raymond’s orig­i­nal title, Train Choir), like Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy is a film of small details and unas­sum­ing crafts­man­ship. It may be too slight for some, but if you let it get under your skin, it packs a dev­as­tat­ing emo­tion­al coda.