2020 Top Ten List #5 Never Rarely Sometimes Always

Director Eliza Hittman

Eliza Hittman on the set

NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS          B+                  

USA  Great Britain  (101 mi)  2020  d:  Eliza Hittman          Official site

He makes me do things I don’t want to do
He makes me say things I don’t want to say
& even though I want to break away
I can’t (stop saying I adore him
I can’t stop doing things for him)
He’s got the power, the power of love over me

—“He’s Got the Power,” by the Exciters, 1963, The Exciters - He's Got The Power (Stereo) - YouTube (2:21)

An intensely personal film, much more mature than her earlier works, revealing a greater depth of character, winner of a Special Jury Award at Sundance for Neo-Realism, interestingly listing filmmaker Barry Jenkins as one of the executive producers, beautifully shot by Hélène Louvart on 16mm, providing a moody and impressionistic landscape of both interior and exterior worlds, including an equally intriguing electronic musical score by Julia Holter that adds a poetic lyricism, with piano music of Robert Schumann thrown in, all centered around the experiences of a young 17-year old girl, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), accentuating naturalism through a continual choreography of close-ups on her face, living in a tough, rural community of Northumberland, Pennsylvania where options are few and far between, calling into question the choices young girls face in today’s world, revealing an incessant war of degradation against women and girls in communities like this.  While ostensibly about the erosion of reproductive rights, where young women from rural areas have to travel great distances to obtain an abortion, modeled after Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland who died in 2012 of blood poisoning in a hospital in Galway after being refused a life-saving abortion, which ended up changing the abortion laws in Ireland.  Society’s aversion to legal abortion is portrayed in a starkly realistic light, kind of America’s version of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) (2007), which is about obtaining an “illegal” abortion, yet the film also unravels layers of ominous warning signs that young girls must learn to navigate at an early age, revealed at the outset in 50’s and 60’s style dance and musical performances from a high school talent show when Autumn is openly slut-shamed, with some guy yelling out “Slut!” in the middle of her daringly different contemporary solo performance of The Exciters “He’s Got the Power,” turning otherwise innocent lyrics into a cautionary tale, clearly indicating an abuse syndrome where men continually wield a stranglehold over women, impinging on their right to choose.  At dinner with her family afterwards, receiving congratulations from her mother (singer Sharon Van Etten) and younger sisters, her stepfather (Ryan Eggold) is openly derisive, literally mocking the idea of offering praise, where it’s clear right from the outset that there are red flag warning signs being exhibited, with fear emanating from his brazen hostility, yet this is an aspect the film doesn’t explore.  Instead it deals with the consequences.  Understated to the core, from the maker of It Felt Like Love (2013) and Beach Rats (2017), this director has a history of exploring young girls in uncomfortable situations, accentuating youthful sexual desires gone awry and the internalized wasteland it can lead to, creating portraits of identity confusion filled with psychological ambiguities, with characters alienated from themselves and others, yet clamoring for love and attention, which they don’t know how to get at their tender young ages, instead pretending to be aloof and disaffected.  This film feels like a logical extension of her earlier work, unvarnished, balancing fear and hope, infused with tension, offering inordinate intimacy, filled with moments of horror, dread, and personal resolve, ultimately becoming a story of resistance. 

Autumn works as a cashier at a local supermarket along with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), both the same age, best friends who look after each other, both sensing early on that it’s just easier being a guy, fewer hassles to deal with, yet one of the creepiest aspects of their job is handing in the money envelopes at the end of their shifts to the store manager, handed through a small window, where he grabs and kisses their hands, oppressive circumstances they are forced to endure as a routine aspect of working there, living in an economically bleak and depressing town with no prospects of a better future.  When Autumn misses a day for medical reasons, Skylar questions what’s the matter, answered by a retching in the employee rest room, having visited a local women’s health center and discovering she’s pregnant, shown a hideous anti-abortion video, expressing little interest.  Her initial answer to that was to bloodily self-inflict a nose-ring piercing, reasserting command over her own body (though in a movie goof, the ring appears later in a different nostril).  She and her cousin brace for what’s next, exploring options through the Internet, discovering minors in her state require parental consent, which for her is not an option, attempting unsuccessfully to self-abort, leaving bruises on her stomach, eventually deciding to travel to New York City for the nearest Planned Parenthood facility.  Skylar steals some cash from the grocery till for their journey, packs a suitcase, and the two sneak out together at the crack of dawn hopping on a bus, immediately encountering a talkative young man their age who takes an interest, Jasper, played by Théodore Pellerin, last seen in an electrifying, over-the-edge performance in the Sophie Dupuis dysfunctional family drama Family First (Chien de Garde) (2018), offering one of the most riveting performances of the year.  While Jasper is a stranger, he’s also perfectly friendly, perhaps overly friendly masking unseen intentions, where it’s important to note their mindset, which is to view him as a potential threat, remaining guarded throughout, lying if necessary to keep him off track, never revealing their real intentions.  Their arrival to New York is like entering foreign territory, as they’re completely unfamiliar with how to get around, having only an address written on a piece of paper, but end up spending plenty of time on subways, more than they wish, as things don’t go exactly as planned.  The initial medical assessment reveals she’s farther along in her pregnancy than she thought, already in the second trimester, so they can’t assist her, requiring a referral to a different Planned Parenthood location, stunned to realize it’s a two-day procedure.  Having no place to stay overnight, they’re shooed out of the bus station between 1 am and 5:30 am, spending most of the night riding the subway, but late night sex perverts send them running off again in a hurry, offering a subterranean feel of late night haunts where “You’re forced to interact with people who are just nothing like you,” including night owls in arcades or bars spilling out onto the street, discovering an indifferent city that never sleeps, allowing them no safe refuge. 

Their early morning arrival to the new facility is laced in an eerie Surrealistic atmosphere, as the streets are lined by pro-life supporters chanting slogans and singing songs, carrying crucifixes, feeling like a tent revival meeting, where the sight is something to behold.  Inside is another story, as the center is staffed by medical professionals who exhibit extreme care when interviewing each patient, asking personal questions that they’ve likely never been asked before, revealing heartbreaking silences that inadvertently reveal the answers.  This kind of gut-wrenching realism is rare in today’s cinema, as it places viewers in someone else’s shoes, forcing us to empathize with their circumstance and feel their fears.  The intense isolation is only magnified, as she’s there alone, having no one else to turn to, perhaps more vulnerable than at any other moment of her life, where there is no mention of the father.  The fact that he is nowhere in the picture takes us back to that earlier family dysfunction, where the likely culprit is the stepfather, causing viewers to only shudder with horror.  She really has no other options, where this is uniquely a woman’s story, facing depths of emotion that no men ever have to experience, adding feminist repurcussions that only magnify the situation, having to confront the inner demons without ever uttering a word about it, yet showing the various stages of minutiae in meticulous detail.  A social worker (Kelly Chapman, an actual counselor) gently guides her through the process, filmed in one continuous shot, the camera holding on Autumn’s face, as only then does the title reveal its significance, Never Rarely Sometimes Always - Clinic Scene YouTube (4:39), where the untold power of these moments is excruciating, acknowledging, much like the opening scene, the unspeakable power a man can hold over a woman, violating her in the worst way, yet she holds her ground, refusing to be demoralized or defeated.  The support system at the clinic is all she’s got, as otherwise she goes through this ordeal alone, spending every last dime on the procedure, having to maintain her resolve through yet another weary night.  Inexplicably, they rely upon Jasper again (who else do they know?), where he’s eager for something to happen, inviting them to go bowling, where he and Skylar have a connection over beer before singing karaoke, with Autumn breaking out into a downbeat version of Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying - Gerry and The ... YouTube (2:34).  As the evening progresses, Autumn is left alone while Skylar embarks upon what she has to do to get money home, yet there are wonderful unspoken moments that exist between the two women that are unforgettable expressions of unconditional love.  The fragility expressed onscreen is indescribable, accentuated by an underlying musical mosaic that exudes a haunting tenderness.  By the time the ordeal is over, it’s as if these are two different women, having endured so much pain together, yet having survived, adapting to unforeseen circumstances and prevailing, yet dreading the chilly future that surely awaits them both.  In something of a surprise, the song over the final credits is actually sung by the actress playing the mother, Sharon Van Etten, 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' (2020)-Soundtrack:"Staring at a Mountain" by Sharon Van Etten/Lyrics YouTube (4:03), sounding like something out of Jonathan Caouette’s laceratingly personal film Tarnation (2003).

by writer/director Eliza Hittman

On behalf of Focus Features and the cast and crew of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, I would like to thank Charles S. Cohen and the entire staff of Landmark Theatres for exhibiting the film; I applaud your bravery for helping us get this film seen, particularly in places in the U.S. where reproductive rights are under threat. The spark for my new film came in 2012, when a woman named Savita Halappanavar died of blood poisoning in a hospital in Galway after being refused a life-saving abortion. Out of devastation, I naively began to research the history of abortion rights in Ireland. In a country where abortion was criminalized, I became fascinated to learn that women who needed abortions were forced to travel from Ireland to England.

I began to read more and more about Ireland’s hidden diaspora and saw a compelling untold narrative about ‘women on the run’ traveling with the unbearable burden of shame. These migratory abortion trails also exist within our own country from rural areas with limited and restrictive access, past state lines and into progressive cities. Through extensive research and interviews over several years I developed this script. After premiering Beach Rats at Sundance in 2017 and following the inauguration of Trump, I felt an urgent need to make this film now. The fate of a woman’s fundamental right to access is at risk. If Roe v. Wade is attacked and abortion made illegal nationwide, how far will we have to travel?

Savita Halappanavar’s death revolutionized Ireland. It unified feminist groups throughout the country and galvanized a movement to reverse the cruel Eighth Amendment that recognizes the life of a mother and a fetus as being equal. They were activated because her identity was not anonymous. She had a name, a face, a warm smile that the country could feel and mourn. The abortion ban was historically repealed last May.

Amidst such a fraught moment in U.S. history, it’s hard not to ask myself how I am doing in my artistic practice can create change. Women’s issues are global issues. By taking a social and political issue and demonstrating its impact on one individual or character, my goal is to find ways to get past our audiences’ defenses against this stigmatized subject and open people up to confronting difficult realities.

As an extension of my body of work, the film balances realism and lyricism, beauty and horror, fear and hope. It is infused with intimacy, discomfort, tension and truth. It will ignite controversy and conversation. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is ultimately a story about resistance and will perhaps even inspire change.

Beach Rats

BEACH RATS             B                  

USA  (95 mi)  2017  d:  Eliza Hittman

Winner of the Best Director Award at Sundance, this film is not nearly as drawn out or as intricately ambitious as the director’s earlier film It Felt Like Love (2013), though it has similarities, following a path of youthful sexual desires gone awry and the internalized wasteland it can lead to, filled with psychological ambiguities, with characters alienated from themselves and others, yet clamoring for love and attention, which they don’t know how to get at their tender young ages, instead pretending to be aloof and disaffected.  In many respects this feels more like a sketch than a full-blown effort, an impressionistic mosaic about a confused male identity, where isolated landscapes of a deserted stretch of beach are the setting for anonymous sexual hookups with other guys, filled with a nocturnal void, as things can inevitably go wrong, creating empty spaces that remain unfilled, yet the unmistakable downward spiral is haunting and effective, bordering on suicidal, where it’s clear we are entering this kind of troubling world that effects so many vulnerable kids with anguished and wounded souls.  It’s also clear in films like Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger By the Lake (L'inconnu du lac) (2013), for instance, that adult gay men face many of these same difficulties, exploring their dangerous impulses, but this film feels more curious about the fleeting moments in the life of a young adolescent prone to making ill-informed decisions.  Like her earlier film, the similarities to the filmmaking of Claire Denis are unmistakable, as clearly she and her cinematographer Hélène Louvart have been influenced by Beau Travail (1999), where men’s bodies, naked from the waist up, are conscientiously gazed upon with probing eyes.  In this case, a gang of four teenage guys from Brooklyn, including Jesse (Anton Selyaninov), Nick (Frank Hakaj), and Alexei (David Ivanov, three non-professionals recruited from the South Brooklyn neighborhood), hang out along the boardwalk of Coney Island, really for no other reason than they have nothing better to do, where their dead-end lives living at home with their parents feel stiflingly claustrophobic, already alienated from family members and society at large.  Following a single boy, Frankie (British newcomer Harris Dickson), a buff young kid who likes to look at himself in the mirror striking various poses, he has little sympathy for his younger sister Carla (Nicole Flyus), while his mother (Kate Hodge) is consumed by her husband in the living room withering away from cancer, attending to him along with a hospice nurse.  Caught off-guard by the circumstances, this seems to prevent Frankie from finding his bearings, as he pretty much avoids his family altogether, hanging out in the basement scoping gay web cam chat sites, eyeing up older guys that interest him, but mostly he seems to like being noticed by them. 

What his Brooklyn gang has in common is an interest in getting high, even visiting a vape shop, competing for best smoke rings, then wandering the streets interacting with whoever they encounter, acting like goofballs, returning home late where they fall into bed completely wasted.  While watching the fireworks at Coney Island, he happens to meet a cute young girl, Simone (Madeline Weinstein), who finds him attractive, bringing her back home where he snorts some coke and has difficulty getting aroused, treating her crudely where she’s forced to make an angry and awkward exit.  Acting like it means nothing, his sexual curiosity leans towards finding other men, a practice he keeps secret from everyone else, even becoming a young hustler who waits for pick-ups near the beach.  His attraction to cruising however is countered by his social need to hang out with the boys, hell-bent on getting high, even returning to Simone and apologizing, confessing a certain confusion by what’s happening with his Dad, where she gives him a second chance.  While some may be more intrigued by the graphic gay sex scenes, rarely filmed by a woman, by the way, but the montage of scenes with Frankie and Simone basically having fun doing stupid things together at a street carnival are actually more impressive, especially the lighting and color schemes, shot on 16mm, emphasizing the director’s attraction to surface qualities, where she seems to get everything right, abandoning plotline altogether for a more abstract, free-flowing glimpse of kids being happy, where it doesn’t take much, mostly it’s just sharing a common mood, where the film excels with a spacious and sophisticated electronic soundtrack by Nicholas Leone, feeling dreamy and atmospheric, setting the tone where the most powerful scenes in the film are wordlessly poetic.  Despite his tendencies, regularly having sex with men, which is easier for him than sex with women, where he apparently presents a façade of masculinity, Frankie never acknowledges that he’s gay, as if it’s something he’s still figuring out.  This, in essence, is the heart of the problem, as everything explored in the film springs from this personal deception.  When he and Simone and the boys go on a pleasure boat cruise, popping pills ahead of time, Frankie gets lost in his fractured identity, growing more unsure of himself and completely thrown off his game when the bartender turns out to be one of his earlier affairs, where it seems like he has to escape from himself, where the disco vibe is loud and oppressive, though accurately shown, as it accentuates luridly sexy females on the dance floor, where he’s off on another wavelength, soon having an emotional breakdown, eventually abandoning Simone altogether, escaping alone into the darkened night, retreating back to the beach and the midnight prowlers, getting his sex off anonymously.

Simone dumps him afterwards, claiming he’s more of a reclamation project than a boyfriend.  Following the death of his father, however, Frankie’s trajectory is a downward spiral, as drugs don’t come so easy and his mother is annoyed by his nocturnal habits, coming home late in who knows what state, setting a terrible example for his sister, who can’t get away with any of his nonsense, spending his life getting wasted.  While his mother tries to get under his skin, asking what’s going on, offering the kind of help only mothers can provide, Frankie can’t handle it, as he doesn’t want anyone delving into his private business, unable to share any of the salacious details of a life of promiscuity, basically having sex only with strangers, where using a condom is not something that enters this guy’s head.  While the film is not really about coming out, as Frankie remains closeted, the effects this has on him are startling, easily irritated, growing moody and easily disturbed, with Frankie finding it harder to hang with the boys, where the effects of having absolutely nothing to do becomes a weight they all carry, turning to him for drugs, as they always have, with pathetic results.  This group dynamic changes when Frankie becomes so desperate for companionship that he mentions cruising gay sex sites to his buddies, claiming his only interest is getting high.  While they find this incredulous and crack homophobic jokes, they agree to set up a plan to meet a guy with the sole intention of taking his drugs.  When this initially fails, with the guy taking off after seeing four guys hanging out, Frankie contacts him again, claiming he’ll be alone, where the plan is to have the others lying in wait.  This flips the script, as Frankie has been lurking in dangerous waters, subject to possible shark attacks, but now he’s become a dangerous sexual predator that preys on others, where a pervasive mood of dread haunts the picture, suddenly injected with horror themes.  Bad things happen, leaving his head spinning afterwards, though he’s largely to blame, but like everything else, this is something he hasn’t figured out yet, wandering alone, out of sorts, revisiting familiar places, but exiled, cut off from the rest of the world, remaining a stranger in a strange world.  Much like Hittman’s earlier film was about the dangers of female sexuality, putting herself in situations before she was ready, with ghastly results, this eye opening film is a cautionary tale for young gay men, who clearly need to come to terms with their own sexual identity or face disastrous consequences, from suicidal inclinations to deviant behavior where they could end up behind bars.  Some of the best insight into the film is expressed by Steve Erickson from The Nashville Scene, With Beach Rats, Eliza Hittman Becomes a Major New Voice, suggesting “Beach Rats is the best demonstration of the dangers of the closet since Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.”

Postscript

There is some controversy about the film because it so closely details the murder of Michael Sandy, a black gay man lured to a Brooklyn beach in 2006, presumably to have sex with a contact he met online, but instead he was met by four attackers who dragged him from his car, with one of the attackers chasing him onto a busy highway, pushing him into the path of an oncoming car that killed him.  Frankie’s character resembles that of Anthony Fortunato, aged 20, allegedly the mastermind behind the crime, who allegedly had a girlfriend and had pulled this kind of stunt before, where the men claimed they were after Sandy’s marijuana, but beat him because he was gay.  Three of the four attackers were later convicted of gay-bashing hate crimes.  During the trial, Fortunato confessed to being gay, begging the question, can a gay man commit a hate crime against another gay man?  The answer is yes, because Sandy was chosen specifically because of his sexual orientation.  The murder resembles an earlier racial incident that occurred at Howard Beach in 1986 when a car carrying four black men broke down on the roadway, forcing one to remain in the car while three walked several miles for help in Howard Beach, a mostly all-white neighborhood, where they were confronted by a group of white teens hurling racial slurs.  One of the three blacks escaped, while the other two were badly beaten, with one, Michael Griffith, chased out onto the highway where he was killed by an oncoming car.  Nine people were ultimately convicted on a variety of charges related to Griffith’s death.   

In Hittman’s film, there is no black victim, as all the participants are white, yet the names of the characters are identical to those killing Sandy, where she received permission from the State of New York to film at the exact same setting as the murder, though what happens to him remains ambiguous, as the film never reveals an outcome.  Despite repeated questioning, Hittman has refused to credit or even acknowledge the Sandy murder as an influence in her film, instead claiming her film represents the mindset of plenty of homophobic guys she grew up with, having gone to school at Edward R. Murrow High School in South Brooklyn.  In a written statement to Gay City News, a LGBT-serving New York City publication, Ms. Hittman wrote:

As a Brooklyn native, I’m aware of the Anthony Fortunato story as well as numerous other cases of intolerance and injustice towards the gay community.  I did not set out to make a biopic or tell anyone’s personal story.  Like my other films, ‘Beach Rats’ explores the fragility and danger of teenage sexuality.  And it’s intended as a poetic exploration of the pressures of masculinity and an identity crisis as a catalyst for violence, which is unfortunately all too common.  Growing up in Brooklyn, I’ve witnessed first-hand instances of homophobia in my own upbringing and community, all of which influenced the writing of this story.