THE BIG SCREEN
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
BY SHEILA O’MALLEY
Director: Eliza Hittman
Country/Distributor: USA/UK, Focus Features
Opening: March 13
A HIGH SCHOOL TALENT SHOW opens Eliza Hittman’s third feature, Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) stands at a microphone, singing a cover of “He’s Got the Power,” accompanying herself on the guitar. Her energy is grim and the pop lyrics, about a man who makes her do things she doesn’t want to do, here sound alarming. It’s a stark contrast with the acts that preceded hers, which had a 1950s theme: girls in poodle skirts and boys with slicked hair, doing Bye Bye Birdie–type dance numbers or a doowop song. Solemn, contemporary Autumn cuts through the kitschy view of teenage life that’s straight out of Leave It to Beaver or the black-and-white sections of Pleasantville.
I kept thinking back to that sequence over the course of this often brutal film, in which Autumn, 17 and pregnant, journeys to New York City with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) to seek an abortion. Hittman’s choice of opening comes to feel more and more pointed as the film unfolds. The bobbysoxer-milkshake version of teenage life wasn’t true in the 1950s, either—it was propaganda back then, too—but what powerful and damaging propaganda it was. There could not be a wider gap between its infantilizing vision and Autumn’s reality.
Autumn and Skylar come from a small, depressed town in Pennsylvania, a state where parents need to give consent for an abortion. There’s no question of Autumn asking hers, and the father of the child is never mentioned. The bus trip to New York is long, and once the two teens are thrust into Port Authority, lugging a huge suitcase, they’re bewildered by the city, trying to figure out mass transit and where they need
