Eliza Hittman’s third feature film, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, was a smash hit at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, winning the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Award for Neorealism. The award and all the subsequent accolades have been well deserved, and Hittman has been honing this neorealistic, cinéma vérité style, with each of her teenage slice of life films getting more and more effective at conveying an authentic, underseen experience onto the screen.
The premise is simple – because abortions in Pennsylvania for those under 18 require parental consent, two teenagers must take a bus to New York City to get the procedure done – but what is special is how Hittman shows this unfold and what happens along the way. It is a no-holds-barred, step-by-step journey into the process of what an under-resourced high school teenager has to go through. The result is an exceedingly intimate and sensitive drama where the characters transcends the plot.
The problem with a simple plot description here is that it makes the film sound unrelentingly bleak. Strangely, it is not. It feels real, but it never devolves into melodrama or tragedy porn. It is stripped down, empathetic, independent storytelling – very matter-of-fact, which, considering the subject matter, makes it all the more effective and impactful. Hittman humanizes what often becomes a political or ideological hot button issue.
The dialogue in this film is pretty minimal, but the two actors, Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder, are superb at conveying what is happening without needing to say it out loud. The wonderfully quiet friendship between the two cousins is a powerful exemplar of female support. There are so many small and seemingly mundane moments – the glances, the waiting, the bitten lips, the wordless anticipation during the medical appointments and sonograms, all convey so much of the inner turmoil and determination that swirls beneath the surface.
Hittman’s teen mumblecore style is a little remisicent of Céline Sciamma, another filmmaker who uses her female gaze to pierce into the teenage psyche of sexuality and identity. Here, she subtly captures the experience of adolescent helplessness but feeling forced to act anyway. It’s astonishing (to me) to see how careful the two girls have to be with their actions, words, and every other interaction with men. This isn’t something they are taught, but clearly a way of life for those who must sense danger to survive, because they know they will have to bear the consequences. This is all unspoken, but it doesn’t need to be said aloud.
There are some comically bad moments in movies where the characters say the title of the film out loud, often in a way that feels unnatural or forced. In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the scene where we hear the title said out loud, and finally understand its meaning, is a gut punch of a sequence, and was probably the most memorable and impactful few minutes of film I had seen in 2020. It’s something that, had I not watched this, I would probably have never learned about as a grown man. When I first heard about the film, I had thought the title was a mouthful, but it will now stay with me forever.
To paraphrase a quote from Edward Yang’s masterwork Yi Yi, movies give us twice what we get from daily life. Aside from entertaining us, cinema can give us the ability to look at things without judgment, to experience things we otherwise never would in a thousand years. In Yi Yi, the example given is that we can know what it’s like to be a killer without having to kill someone. Never Rarely Sometimes Always gives us a much more useful and urgent insight as we step inside someone else’s shoes for an hour and 40 minutes, to see what it’s like to be a teenage girl in a world controlled by men.
Now streaming on HBO Max
