TONAL ISSUES HOLD BACK ‘WONDERFUL WANDA’
We meet Wanda on a bus from Poland to Germany, where she is returning to work for a prosperous family in their gracious lakeside villa. The patriarch has suffered a stroke and is bedridden; he’s sent all the other help away. He wants Wanda back. There’s also work to do preparing for his upcoming 70th birthday celebration, which his wife is determined to throw even amid suboptimal conditions.
Such are the broad outlines of “My Wonderful Wanda,” an engrossing but uneven comedy-drama by Bettina Oberli. Agnieszka Grochowska is intriguingly opaque as the title character, a pretty, self-possessed woman who demonstrates her shrewdness during an early salary negotiation: She’s sharply aware of her options in all situations.
Those include not just her relationship with paterfamilias Josef (André Jung), but his grown children Gregi
(Jacob Matschenz), who harbors a crush on Wanda, and Sophie (Birgit Minichmayr), a competitive, temperamental daughter who bristles at Wanda’s presence and sees her as a threat.
“My Wonderful Wanda” is cleverly structured as three separate trips that Wanda takes to Germany, each under dramatically different circumstances. And Oberli aspires to infuse the film
with comic edge: This is a meditation on class conflict reminiscent of “Parasite” (with a dash of atavistic German-Polish rivalry), leavened by “Juno”-esque screwball elements. Unfortunately, that tonal balance isn’t always effective, and the filmmaker loses control of the material the more contrived and overdetermined the plot gets.
Despite the sometimes
rickety scaffolding they’re asked to inhabit, all of the actors deliver honest, grounded performances. But the most compelling among them is Marthe Keller, who plays Elsa — the family’s patient, exquisitely tasteful wife and mother — with a radiance that illuminates the entire film. Wanda may be wonderful, but Keller’s Elsa is lit from within.