Eliza Hittman makes small, close films about young people in trouble who will not say what the trouble is, and she lets the camera and the paperwork do the talking. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is where the method pays off in full.
Fi1m perspective
A Hittman film keeps the camera close enough to watch a face decide not to speak. Her people are teenagers, mostly, in Brooklyn or a small Pennsylvania town, and each of them has something they cannot tell anyone, so the film watches them not telling it: long takes on skin and hands and the back of a neck, hardly any talk, nobody explaining. In Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) that silence is the whole engine. Autumn travels from Pennsylvania to New York to end a pregnancy, and every obstacle she meets is a form, a fee, a waiting time or a second appointment, and the film simply counts them. Nobody makes a speech.
Three features in seven years, all written by her, all about young people at the edge of the adult world. It Felt Like Love (2013) is about a Brooklyn girl and desire; Beach Rats (2017) about a boy on the coast of the same borough and a secret he keeps from everyone; then the errand film, which we scored 84 and recommend warmly. In between she directed television, including episodes of High Maintenance (2018). She casts first-time actors and looks for them where teenagers actually are, and she does her homework: for the third film she had the clinic read her drafts and let her shoot inside its building. It shows. The waiting rooms look like waiting rooms.
Hélène Louvart shot the last two films, on 16mm and close digital, and keeps the frame on the body with the light kept low. Scott Cummings has cut all three features and lets shots run past the point most editors would leave. Between them they give Hittman what she wants, which is time. We came out of Never Rarely Sometimes Always shaken and could not point to one scene that had done it; it was the counting, the sixth form after the fifth, and two girls who say almost nothing while the numbers add up.
The charge against her is coldness, and we understand it. She stands back, some viewers find the films withholding, and the patient repetition can turn into monotony if you have not come to it in the right frame of mind. Our own caveat is narrower. Every man Autumn passes is a hazard, from the stepfather who calls the family dog a slut across the dinner table to the man on the subway with his hand in his trousers, and Hittman makes the point six times where three would do. She has said she wanted no single villain but a world that is "in smaller and larger ways hostile to women". Fair enough as a plan; on screen, the subway scene belongs to a blunter film than the one around it.
She has now made three films about people under twenty who cannot say what is wrong. Sooner or later she will have to film someone who can, and we would like to see what she does with the talk.
Biography
Eliza Hittman is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in 1979 in New York City, she graduated from Indiana University in 2001 with a BA in theatre and drama, and received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2010.
Her debut feature It Felt Like Love (2013) premiered at Sundance. Her second film Beach Rats (2017) also premiered there, where it won the Directing Award. Hittman wrote and directed Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020), which premiered at Sundance, winning a Special Jury Award, and later took the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. She has also directed episodes of the series High Maintenance (2016) and 13 Reasons Why (2017). Hittman is an associate professor of film and video at Pratt Institute.
