Abortion in Film: THR Critics Recommend 12 Movies to Revisit
Before Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, The Hollywood Reporter’s critics, at a time when the decision was under direct challenge, looked at some of the most inspired examples of the ways filmmakers around the world have explored the reality of abortion in women’s lives.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/12-movies-about-abortion-1235022140/
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I hope this will pass as being more political than about showbiz. I learned of some movies on this list that I definitely will look for and watch!!!
Here is the list. I've included the description of the movies I found particularly interesting:
Dirty Dancing (1987)
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
Grandma (2015)
Lingui, the Sacred Bonds (2021)
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)
One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977)
Agnès Varda’s ode to female friendship and women’s liberation traces the bond between two young women over a dozen years, beginning in 1962. That bond is forged when Apple (Valérie Mairesse), a 17-year-old with a fiercely independent streak, secures the money needed for her new friend Suzanne (Thérèse Liotard), an overwhelmed mother of two toddlers, to have a safe abortion — across the French border, in Switzerland. “Free will is philosophy in action,” the feisty teen proclaims, and when she and Suzanne meet again, 10 years later, they’re both participating in a courthouse protest over an abortion trial. Made by one of cinema’s great innovators, this melodrama with songs (lyrics by Varda) unfolds against the political awakening of the 1960s and ’70s, when gender roles and the idea of family were being questioned and reinvented. Varda’s feminist vision embraces love, whimsy, joyful bohemia and tenderness no less than healthy anger over injustice. — S.L.
Plan B (2021)
Buddy comedy meets road trip movie in Natalie Morales’ charming film about two South Dakotan teens’ panicked, chaotic search for the morning-after pill. After a condom falls out of her vagina the morning after losing her virginity, and after being denied access to Plan B by a morally opposed pharmacist — citing a real legal clause — Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) enlists her best friend, Lupe (Victoria Moroles), for a three-hour drive to the nearest Planned Parenthood. With its strong casting and focus on the experiences of girls who aren’t white, Morales’ film is a necessary addition to the ever-evolving subgenre of movies about teens forced to circumvent a cruel lack of access to reproductive health services. — L.G.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Story of Women (1988)
Claude Chabrol’s film stars the ineffable Isabelle Huppert as Marie Latour, a complicated character based on Marie-Louise Giraud, who in 1943 was the last woman to be guillotined in France, after being convicted for her illegal work as an abortionist. This gripping and complex tale about an enterprising housewife who begins performing abortions in her kitchen to support her family in Vichy France is made all the better by Huppert’s resolute and unnerving performance (she was named best actress at the Venice Film Festival). Chabrol’s layered tale resists sentimentalizing Latour’s work, resulting in an absorbing portrait of a woman trying to make ends meet, and in the process providing a service to women in need. — L.G.
The Surrogate (2020)
Unpregnant (2020)
Vera Drake (2004)
In Mike Leigh’s shattering 2004 drama, the title character played with cheery bustle by a never-better Imelda Staunton is a middle-aged housewife in 1950 working-class London, who tirelessly tends to her family, dashes between cleaning jobs and visits sick friends and relatives in whatever spare time she has left. What neither her family nor her friends know is that this salt-of-the-earth woman provides back-street abortions, an unpaid service she describes as “helping young girls out when they can’t manage.” With nonjudgmental compassion and not a whisper of melodrama, Leigh observes the vast difference in options for pregnant women on opposite sides of the class divide at a time when abortion was illegal in Britain, quietly threading a sense of crushing dread as the film builds to Vera’s inevitable exposure and arrest. — D.R.
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