Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

One ambiguity untouched in the articles I have read thus far is that the city is no real escape and no fount of freedom from Autumn's Pennsylvania. Or perhaps it's simply because this city is New York City. Anyway, cool to see Hélène Louvart's backflipping camera here before we see it again in Alice Rohwacher's La Chimera (2023).

Hittman’s dreamy coming-of-age stories at times suggest something from the Larry Clark school of provocation, where a certain penchant for transgression comes at the expense of verisimilitude. But the strength of this film is that its transgression comes from the shock of how the abortion system works.

— Ben Flanagan (Slant Magazine)

“It was kind of whatever,” is how Autumn recaps the operation to Skylar. “Just uncomfortable.” Just before she goes under, Hittman places us in the operating room with her: the camera roves the room, and Autumn sees an IV bag of fluids with her name Sharpied on it, her life condensed into a label. For the sake of protocol, the doctors ask Autumn to state the name of the procedure before the anesthesia kicks in. At the end of this journey, it seems like such a humble request. But in that dissonance, Hittman beautifully illustrates how much is contained within this seemingly straightforward statement.

— Chloe Lizotte (Reverse Shot)

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is an emotionally demanding film that refuses to make its heroine’s pain accessible to viewers. Instead—perhaps counterintuitively—it repeatedly punctuates moments of emotional intensity with images of Autumn looking away from the camera. [These] lingering shots depict a character immersed in her own interiority but do not communicate her thoughts or feelings to the viewer. The first occurs as Autumn contemplates her face in a bathroom mirror at night. The camera captures her self-examination from an oblique angle before panning down to her exposed lower abdomen. It then cuts to Autumn lying in bed, again staring off-screen; her face is inexpressive, although the movement of her eyes suggests intense deliberation. She rolls over, and the film shifts again, reversing screen direction and introducing a natural light source to convey … what? … that time has passed, that it is now morning, that Autumn has been up all night thinking? The viewer never finds out: the next scene shows Autumn lacing her boots and leaving for her first appointment at the Ellenboro Women’s Clinic. Her destination suggests what she was thinking about but not how she feels about it.

— Caetlin Benson-Allott (Film Quarterly)

I think a lot of people want to categorize [my film] as being some extension of vérité, but the truth is that there’s no presence of a cameraperson on screen.

— Director Eliza Hittman