The flipside of that pleasure, and another kind of triumph, can be found in the French director Audrey Diwan’s Happening, which won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival.

You can become abortion counselors,” she recalls saying, and her mischievous smile conveys the pure pleasure to be had in defying both a law and a social order designed to crush your liberty. In an exhilarating moment, one of the Janes remembers a meeting in which a group of women were wondering how they could remain activists without getting the chauvinist brush off. They had all worked in the antiwar movement, and many of them describe how they were made subordinate to their male colleagues. Wade, which Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested is an advance motion to turn the United States into a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, we’ll be lucky if we get partisan filmmaking as passionate and humane as Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin’s documentary The Janes, about the band of Chicago women who, in the years before Roe, came together to provide and eventually perform abortions for women in need of them. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court coup against Roe v.

Political and moral conviction can drive artists to good work, even if that work has no wish to understand its villains except as paragons of cruelty and power. It’s possible to believe that aesthetics should not take a back seat to politics and still, when things are dire, feel the pull of artists who choose urgency over nuance. Both merciless and humane, Happening presents abortion in the spirit of Simone de Beauvoir in the Manifesto of the 343-as something necessary to allow women the ability to realize their full potential as citizens.

The killer inside me novel