Eliza Hittman
Never Rarely Sometimes Always

When you start watching Never Rarely Sometimes Always by Eliza Hittman, you already have a rough idea of what to expect: Autumn, 17 years old, is pregnant, and sets off to New York with her cousin, Skylar, to have an abortion. The film is all here, but not in a reductive sense: its being all here is its strength.

If you don’t know it because you haven’t read the synopsis, you will still understand quite soon what you are going to see: Autumn comes on stage - literally - on a school stage, singing and playing guitar, and is the object of the disdainful gazes of a male teenage audience. The scene immediately sets the dramatic premises of the film, showing Autumn, alone and the victim of a thinly-veiled and palpable hostility, but who, at the same time, alone, continues and completes her performance, greeted by the applause of the audience, and the same old looks from before. Shortly after, she takes a pregnancy test: she's pregnant. The kind lady at the public facility she has turned to encourages her to take the news positively, appealing to the universal beauty of the concept of motherhood and then to the words of a conscientious objector, and the doctor lets her hear the heartbeat of the fetus, a magical sound, she says. Autumn learns that in Pennsylvania, abortion for minors is allowed only with parental consent, so she tries to induce a miscarriage; failing this attempt, she and her cousin Skyler set off for New York.

Arriving in the Big Apple, whose dynamism and liberalism are only marginally captured in opposition to the quieter and more bigoted Pennsylvania, the first clinic they turn to informs Autumn that it is not possible to perform the operation because she has exceeded 12 weeks of pregnancy, and they direct her to another facility. The next morning, at the new facility, before beginning the intake procedure, Autumn speaks with a social worker, charged with ascertaining her psychophysical health.

“I’m going to ask you some questions now. There are many, so try to answer as best as you can.”

These are the words the woman tells her. Okay, I thought, perhaps now there will be a cut, we have already seen enough of the medical and bureaucratic dynamics on the subject, now we will see something more intimate and private regarding Autumn. I understood nothing.

The heart of the film is here, hidden by anamnesis and bureaucracy: the heart of the film is a forced conversation, a series of questions and answers, which also turns out to be the longest dialogue sequence, as well as the most intense, because Autumn and Skyler, between them, do not talk much, and not because they are distant or distrustful of each other; their conversation is sparse and straightforward as it might be objectively between two provincial teenagers going to have an abortion, but, at the same time, their way of communicating becomes a metaphor for a deeper silence concerning their lives, their experiences, which, in one way or another, unite them. An emblematic figure is Jasper, whom Skyler and Autumn meet during their journey, and to whom they ask for money to pay for their return ticket: to obtain it, Skyler accepts his advances. Autumn says nothing, but makes her feel her closeness through a gesture, not the only one in the film to symbolize female solidarity.

There is no empowerment in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, at least not as we are used to seeing it represented, instead, there is a dramatic portrayal of the reality of the female condition that makes me think more of social realism. The two things, empowerment and realism, clash with each other especially because too often the first has assumed the guise of Wonder Women, devils wearing Prada, queens of chess, with a degree of inclusivity that now extends to black, Asian, queer and transgender women, but remains far from the real experiences and possibilities of change that the vast majority of women can encounter and achieve. The panorama the film paints is partly dramatically and realistically bleak, precisely because the situations it represents are real, current, generalizable, but it is revived precisely by those gestures of female solidarity, which are spontaneous, natural, gentle, and in themselves constitute the hope for emancipation and change. In some parts, there is a bit of rhetoric, such as in Skyler's question to Autumn, “Do you ever think it would be better to be a boy?”, to which she replies “Always”, or in the crowd of Christians protesting outside the clinic, but the film hits the mark, and does so especially thanks to that central scene where, if silence speaks a thousand words, four words destroy it, shattering it dramatically. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is all here.