Eliza Hittman’s film about a Pennsylvania teenager travelling to New York to end a pregnancy is plain, exact and hard to shake, carried by two leads who say almost nothing. Its men are all drawn as hazards, and that is its one real flaw.
Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is seventeen and lives in a small town in Pennsylvania. She sings at the school talent show and a boy in the audience shouts “slut” at her. She works a supermarket checkout beside her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), and at the end of the shift the manager takes their cash through a hatch and kisses their hands. At the local pregnancy centre a woman hands her a test and a pamphlet and tells her she is ten weeks gone. A girl her age cannot end a pregnancy in Pennsylvania without a parent’s say-so, and Autumn is not going to ask. So Skylar takes money from the till, and the two of them get on an overnight bus to New York with one suitcase between them.
Eliza Hittman wrote and directed it, and it is a plain, exact film about a hard errand. We recommend it, warmly, with one caveat we will come to. It is not an argument. Nobody makes a speech. Every obstacle Autumn meets is a form, a fee, a waiting time or a second appointment, and the film simply counts them.
Hélène Louvart shoots handheld and close, on grainy film, so that most of what we see is two faces. Pennsylvania is winter fields and strip-lit shop floors. New York is the bus station at night, yellow light on wet tiles. Meredith Lippincott’s production design does its sharpest work in the two waiting rooms: the first, back home, has cots and photographs of babies on every wall; the second has a notice about payment plans. Olga Mill keeps Autumn in the same oversized hoodie for the whole trip, because she has nothing else to change into. Julia Holter’s score is a few low synthesiser tones and it stays away for long stretches, leaving buses, escalators and Autumn’s breathing.
About halfway through, a counsellor at the clinic sits Autumn down and works through a standard form. Each question about her life at home and with men has the same four permitted answers, and they are the title of the film. Louvart holds Flanigan’s face in a single shot for the length of it, and editor Scott Cummings does not cut. We stopped breathing around the third question. Flanigan answers by answering slowly, and by not answering, and by the end we know more about the last two years of this girl’s life than any flashback could have told us. It is the best scene in the film.
Talia Ryder’s Skylar is the other half of the picture and gets no speeches at all. She steals the money, buys the tickets, works out the subway, and when the cash runs out she keeps Jasper (Théodore Pellerin), a chatty boy from the bus, on the hook in case he turns out to be useful. The cousins hardly discuss what they are doing. There is a small gesture between them late on that we will not describe, except to say it moved us more than anything spoken in the film, and nothing is spoken during it.
The caveat is the men. The heckler; the manager; Autumn’s stepfather Ted (Ryan Eggold), who calls the family dog a slut across the dinner table; a man on the subway with his hand in his trousers; Jasper himself. Every man Autumn passes is a hazard. We take the point, but Hittman makes it six times where three would do, and the subway scene belongs to a blunter film than this one. Sharon Van Etten, as Autumn’s mother, gets a few minutes, and we wanted one more scene between them.
For a subject that is shouted about so loudly, the film is almost silent on the shouting. The word “abortion” is used as often as it would be in a clinic, which is to say plainly. It runs 101 minutes and feels longer in the way the journey is long, with a good deal of sitting on hard chairs. That is deliberate and we would not cut it. Watch it with a teenager if you have one to hand. They will find it less shocking than you do, which is worth knowing.
