Call Jane | Good topic, your debatable

A Chicago stay-at-home mom must end a pregnancy to save her life while abortion is still illegal in the United States. She then got involved in the Jane collective, which really existed to allow women to have clandestine abortions.

Emilie Cote
The Press

August 1968. Joy and her husband, a criminal lawyer, attend a lawyers’ party as protests take place in the streets to legalize abortion.

It is a rather late pregnancy for the housewife, already the mother of a 15-year-old teenager, interpreted with accuracy by Elizabeth Banks, who leaves her usual register.

Joy has a bad feeling. After she loses consciousness to the sound of a Velvet Underground song, her doctor confirms that carrying her pregnancy to term could jeopardize her life. The medical committee of her hospital, however, refuses that she can have a therapeutic abortion, because the child could be born healthy.

We are five years before Roe v. wadethe historic judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States which recognized in 1973 the right of American women to have an abortion.

Joy could claim she’s suicidal. She also thinks of jumping off the top of her stairs, but eventually, she will hear about a collective led by a woman named Virginia (Sigourney Weaver) who helps women terminate their pregnancies “no questions asked”.

Not only will Joy undergo a clandestine abortion, but she will also become involved within the group afterwards. The film exposes interesting facts, including that black women had less access to illegal abortions due to the hundreds of dollars to pay. And it takes an unexpected turn of which we will not reveal anything.

If all the ingredients are there for a great film, the “feel-good” tone of Call Jane, accentuated by the music, quickly annoys us, just like the production that is too “telefilm”. This discrepancy is all the greater for those who have seen the French film The event, directed by Audrey Diwan from a book by Annie Ernaux, which relates the dangerous and agonizing race against time of a young woman who wants to end her pregnancy at all costs.

Elizabeth Banks’ acting, with more finesse than Sigourney Weaver’s, compensates for the questionable tone that director Phyllis Nagy has agreed to give to Call Jane (not to be confused with the HBO documentary The Janeswhich relates to the same collective).

However, with the acquired right to abortion which is more than ever threatened in certain American states, the subject of the film is too serious and too topical to be treated so lightly.

Indoors

Drama

Call Jane

Phyllis Nagy

Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver and Chris Messina

1:58

6/10