COLLECTIVE MEMORY

After recent events in the US Supreme Court, with women’s reproductive rights curtailed, 1960s abortion drama CALL JANE has taken on an unsettling new resonance. Total Film talks with director Phyllis Nagy and her cast about one of the year’s most vital works.  

- JAMES MOTTRAM

24 JUNE 2022.

A date surely burnt into the consciousness of many. The day that the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling established in 1973 that enshrined abortion as a constitutional right. For the cast and creators of Call Jane, it was not entirely a surprise. After all, one of Donald Trump’s outgoing acts as president was to appointment Republicanleaning judges to the highest court in the land. “I knew something awful was going to happen,” sighs director Phyllis Nagy. “I just didn’t think it would be this awful.”

Since Call Jane’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, it’s moved right into the centre of the conversation. Beginning in August 1968, it follows one woman’s induction into the Jane Collective, a group who helped pregnant women get safe abortions when it was illegal in the US to do so. “The relevance of it is scary,” notes Kate Mara, who co-stars alongside Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver. “I guess it kind of feels like it was meant to be told at the time that we told it.”

Nagy’s film isn’t the only one to tap the zeitgeist. Last year’s Venice Film Festivalwinner Happening told of a young French student gathering her resources to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in secret, while Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always followed a 17-year-old as she left Pennsylvania to seek an abortion in New York, where she doesn’t need parental consent. “I think about that film all the time,” says Weaver, “because that, of course, is a modern-day story. And it’s during Roe. And it shows how precarious the situation of that young woman is and how alone she feels.”