Movies

Before writing her new movie, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” about the odyssey of a 17-year-old girl in present-day Pennsylvania seeking a legal abortion, the director Eliza Hittman embarked on a journey of her own. Hittman makes movies of quietly operatic intensity about vulnerable characters in unremarkable places. To find their narratives, she begins in the field, exploring prospective locations like a sculptor wandering a quarry.Hittman, who is 40 and lives in Brooklyn, traveled by bus to a blue-collar town in Pennsylvania, where state law forbids minors from receiving an abortion without a parent’s consent. There, she toured so-called crisis pregnancy centers, which counsel against abortion regardless of circumstance, and posed as a woman who feared she might be pregnant and needed advice.In the movie, available on-demand Friday, a girl named Autumn (the newcomer Sidney Flanigan), lives Hittman’s experiment in reverse. Fleeing the ambient hostility of her hometown, she and a cousin (Talia Ryder) get on a bus bound for New York City, where they encounter a series of obstacles and villains — a byzantine health care system, the casual misogyny of strange men — that are more devastating because their banality rings true.At a time when a new conservative majority on the Supreme Court is considering novel restrictions on abortion providers, and as some states have moved to temporarily ban abortions during the coronavirus pandemic, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is a provocative appraisal of such measures from the perspective of the afflicted.It’s also the rare movie about abortion rights that doesn’t litigate their morality, choosing instead to focus on the social and structural forces that would subvert a young woman’s will.“I don’t think the film is persuasively trying to change anyone’s mind,” Hittman said, in an in-person interview last month before state-mandated isolation orders in New York. “It’s just asking you to walk in another person’s shoes.”“Never Rarely,” a New York Times Critic’s Pick that won prizes at the Berlin and Sundance film festivals earlier this year, was briefly released in theaters on March 13, the week before most major exhibitors shuttered their doors in response to the pandemic. The film’s backers, including the U.S. distributor Focus Features, hope that by sending the film to paid video on demand early — an approach used by previous 2020 releases from Focus parent Universal and others — it will reach some would-be theatrical viewers.“We’re never going to be able to get our original rollout back,” said Adele Romanski, a producer of the film. “But there was an opportunity to take some of that momentum and be at the forefront of this new frontier of cinema.”“We’ve been lucky that the film was already reviewed and recognized as something special,” Hittman said. “I’m optimistic that it will find an audience no matter what.”Along with Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” about a love affair in 18th-century France, and Alex Thompson’s “Saint Frances,” about a 30-something waitress re-evaluating her life, “Never Rarely” is one of a handful of movies this year to portray abortion through a feminist lens.All but “Saint Frances” were directed by women, part of a recent uptick in the number of working female directors in the industry overall. Though still a small minority compared with men, last year nearly 11 percent of the top-grossing movies in Hollywood were directed by women, compared with just 4.5 percent in 2018, according to research by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.Hittman was first inspired to write her film after learning the story of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland who died during a miscarriage in 2012 after her request for an emergency abortion was denied under constitutional law. (The law was repealed in a referendum in 2018.)At the time, the director had just finished her first feature, “It Felt Like Love” (2013), a nervy character study about the sexual awakening of a 14-year-old girl in working-class Brooklyn. She had visions of a story in a similar vein about a pregnant teenager’s harrowing journey, but struggled to find financial backing.“There wasn’t that much interest in the idea then,” Hittman said. “People didn’t think it was relevant.”She continued working on the script while she made another film, “Beach Rats” (2017), which earned her the directing prize at Sundance and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In the meantime, the political landscape — and the appetites of studios — changed dramatically.Hittman was at Sundance with “Beach Rats” in January 2017 when she decided the time for “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” had come.“I had attended the Women’s March at Sundance and there was just all this chaos in the air around the country,” she said. “I knew that this was the story that I needed to tell.” More

Hello, fellow film lovers!We’re bunkered down at home and missing the movies. We miss the dramas and comedies, and we miss sharing a theater, the love and the friendly debates. If you miss that too, Your Weekend Watch is here for you. The idea is that we pick a movie, we all watch it over the weekend, you weigh in on the film (like it, hate it) and then we do.The last time we got together (virtually), it was to watch the Tom Cruise vehicle “Top Gun.” For our next Weekend Watch, we have returned to the Hollywood vault and selected “His Girl Friday” (1940), about men and women, romance and work, and the glories and outrages of a subject that is especially dear to both of us: journalism. No hissing.[embedded content]You may have seen it already, but that’s OK. So have we, a lot (more than either of us remembers). There’s something comforting about watching an old Hollywood film. Part of this is just familiarity — nice to see you, Cary Grant — and part of it is, well, the genius of the system. But while many consider “His Girl Friday” a classic, it hasn’t always been loved. In his review for The New York Times, the critic Frank S. Nugent carped, “The lines are all cute if you can hear them, but you can’t hear many because every one is making too much noise — the audience or the players themselves.” Ouch.At once simple and twisty, “His Girl Friday” is essentially a romantic duel between a newspaper editor, Walter Burns (Grant) and his ex-wife, the ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell). Hildy’s about to get married, but a breaking story — and Walter — keep getting in her way. It’s based on “The Front Page,” a crackling play that the film puts into delirious overdrive. And now Hildy is a woman, a glorious change.Does it matter? That’s one of the things that we’ll be chewing over while we’re watching “His Girl Friday” again. Is Hildy a role model? Or is it Russell who makes the character feel liberated? Hildy isn’t just a great “newspaperman,” as she’s called. She and Walter are equals who can both dish it out and take it, no matter how stinging and funny the barb. Oh, and one more question: is Cary Grant the greatest film actor in history? We have thoughts.“His Girl Friday” is on several platforms (here’s a guide), but be warned that there are disgracefully battered copies out there. The best-looking ones we found are on the Criterion Channel and a free version on YouTube. So, take a look and, after you have watched, tell us what you think in the comments section below. Be sure to weigh in by 6 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. We’ll return with our reactions to your comments on Wednesday. Have fun, talk soon, be safe. More

Alfred Hitchcock may seem like an odd choice for this column, which purports to recommend entry points for movie genres you don’t get or directors who seem difficult. Hitchcock, by contrast, could easily be considered the most famous director who ever lived. His run from 1958 to 1963 alone — “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” “Psycho,” “The Birds” — consists exclusively of films that almost everyone knows.Yet Hitchcock made more than 50 features, and watching and returning to them is a lifelong pursuit. Most of his films are available to stream in some form or other.One of Hitchcock’s most daring experiments, “Rope” (1948), is a great gateway movie because, by breaking certain rules, it teaches you a lot about how films are made.“Rope”: Rent or buy it on Amazon, FandangoNow, iTunes and YouTube.Movies aren’t “supposed” to be shot on single sets (although Hitchcock made five that mostly were). Movies are supposed to have cuts, and this one — to a large extent — preserves the illusion of being shot in a single take (although the cuts that are visible are crucial to the film’s impact). And aside from the opening credits, “Rope” is set entirely within a New York apartment, which makes it, along with Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954), a movie of the moment.“Rope” inevitably comes up whenever directors, like Sam Mendes in “1917,” shoot movies designed to look as if they were filmed in uninterrupted takes. That was part of Hitchcock’s experiment, but far from the whole of it. The plot of “Rope” has obvious similarities to the Leopold and Loeb case from 1924, when two Chicago graduate students kidnapped and killed a teenage boy.In the movie, two men, the domineering Brandon (John Dall) and the meek Phillip (Farley Granger), strangle an old school chum, David, simply for the sensation of getting away with murder. They then put the body in a book chest and cover the chest with a tablecloth, to use it as a serving table at a party. The dead man’s father (Cedric Hardwicke), aunt (Constance Collier) and girlfriend (Joan Chandler) attend, along with the three men’s former prep-school housemaster, Rupert (James Stewart).This was the third of five films that Hitchcock shot predominantly on a single set. His early talkie “Juno and the Paycock” (1930), derived from a stage play, adhered to the intuitive wisdom that it was necessary to “open up” a theater adaptation by occasionally, arbitrarily bringing characters outdoors. But Hitchcock told François Truffaut that he felt like he had stolen a success. “The film got very good notices,” he said, “but I was actually ashamed, because it had nothing to do with cinema.”Each of the other four films takes a different approach to the single-set problem, and none feels remotely theatrical. “Lifeboat” (1944) effectively treats one space as multiple spaces, allowing private conversations to occur despite the fact that the characters are in tight quarters on a vessel in the Atlantic. “Dial M for Murder” (1954) uses 3-D to play tricks with perspective. “Rear Window” (1954), despite being set in one stagelike apartment, directly addresses the act of looking through a camera. Stewart plays a housebound photographer who gazes through a lens at a set of still frames (the windows across the courtyard) and figuratively sets them into motion, seeing a murder story. The movie has long been recognized as a metaphor for filmmaking.“Rope,” Hitchcock’s first film with Stewart, is also about voyeurism. It is easy to get caught up in the suspense of the story, and to make the mistake of thinking you are watching filmed theater. But repeat viewings reveal that it is one of the best places to get a sense of Hitchcock as a master of film technique. Although Hitchcock told Truffaut he wanted to see whether it was possible to shoot a movie as continuous action, the way the play unfolded, he didn’t abandon the special shifts in emphasis that he could only make with a camera — or with cuts, which “Rope” assuredly includes.First, there are the famous cuts that came from technical limitations. Hitchcock couldn’t shoot an 80-minute movie in one take (cameras couldn’t hold that much film), so he occasionally had to dolly the camera into the backs of the men’s suit jackets, briefly obscuring the frame in darkness to hide a cut. But there are also plain-vanilla cuts in “Rope.” Hitchcock uses them to punctuate important moments in the dramatic action, giving a subliminal jolt to viewers, when, for instance, Rupert catches Phillip in a lie.Watch when the camera pushes in for close-ups or makes unexpected movements, as when the aunt arrives and momentarily mistakes another guest for the dead David, startling Phillip. At another point, while the guests, off camera, discuss where David could possibly be, Hitchcock’s gaze remains ruthlessly fixed on the housekeeper (Edith Evanson) removing the candles and tablecloth from the book chest in which David’s body is hidden.Students of film will be familiar with the 180-degree rule. Set a camera in one position relative to the actors; once you’ve picked a side, cutting to a shot from the opposite side will momentarily disorient viewers. There are only a few occasions when the camera skirts or crosses that line in “Rope,” and it does so subtly, always when Rupert is on the verge of a discovery. And because those are the angles from which a theater audience would be seen from a stage — the angles from which most of the film is shot — Hitchcock implicates viewers in Rupert’s j’accuse.“Rope” was Hitchcock’s first color film, but he approached the palette not for potential scenic beauty but as a tool. In 1948, Hitchcock crowed in the magazine Popular Photography about the panorama of the New York skyline that he had made for the “Rope” soundstage, with the setting sun conveying the passage of time. (The article, an excellent guide to the film’s making, can be found in the essential book “Hitchcock on Hitchcock.”) When Rupert confronts Brandon with the monstrosity of his crime, neon lights from outside flood the room — a device that Hitchcock would resurface in “Vertigo.”What initially looks like a filmed play turns out to be highly cinematic. And “Rope” is prime evidence that Hitchcock, as popular as he was, could execute a radical experiment within a mainstream art form without ever losing his accessibility. More