The protagonist of the indie film "Never Rarely Sometimes Always", two high school girls in a small Pennsylvania town are surrounded by no male role models, only rude classmates, scheming managers, and money-seekers. Teenagers, teenage stepfathers, and weird uncles of every kind, whether at the checkout at a small-town supermarket or on the late-night New York subway.
For expectant mothers, each day of the countdown means one step closer to fulfillment, but for high school students it’s basically a ticking time bomb ticking toward the tipping point. The girls in the movie tried various methods to terminate the pregnancy, including swallowing a lot of vitamin tablets and hitting the abdomen with their fists, of course, the results were not satisfactory.
Unlike China, young girls can easily find a clinic for painless treatment according to the advertisements on telephone poles or WeChat, but the girls in the American Rust Belt can only be cornered after an unexpected pregnancy, and she basically loses the ownership of her body. and dominance. The women's health service in the small town is actually just a screw in the powerful anti-abortion machine in American society. They can only bite the bullet and take a long-distance bus to New York in the case of relative lack of liquidity.
At a time when one state after another in the United States has forced abortion clinics to single digits or even close to zero, it is fortunate that there are liberal islands like New York to accommodate Planned Parenthood, although almost every such institution will be strictly guarded at the door. One of the clinic's security checks was meticulous over the airport, and there must be Christians singing gospel songs on the street to discourage women from seeking help.
The core scene design in the film is super simple but packs an amazing punch. Questionnaire conversations between high school girls and New York health clinic counselors covered topics ranging from drug allergy history to sexual experiences. Her answers highly condensed the complex challenges young American women face as they grow up, ranging from gender, psychology, physiology, Desires, emotions, family, finances, geography, all the way down to religion and politics, it’s not difficult to conjure up the loss of American manufacturing, the US-China trade war or even a phase one trade deal.
If I vote, this low-budget little production should be the best American movie of 2020.
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