The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!” chants a group of student protesters – “yippies”, in the eyes of suspicious, coiffed lawyers – in the opening scene of Call Jane, screenwriter Phyllis Nagy’s meticulous, if not revelatory, film on an underground network of abortion providers in Chicago. It’s August 1968, five years before Roe v Wade, and the energy is combustible enough to ruffle even Joy (Elizabeth Banks, a fascinating mix of softness and steel), a suburban housewife pregnant with her second child.Joy, to use the parlance of a later decade, “has it all” – an attractive, successful husband in lawyer Will (Chris Messina), a picket-fence house, 15-year-old daughter Charlotte (Grace Edwards) – but she is still drawn to the buzz of revolution. In an arresting first scene, the camera follows behind Joy, polished and bejeweled, past the yippie clash with police to her husband’s car, where she muses over their mantra out loud.Call Jane 2022 Movie Download.
Call Jane, from a screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, plants this seed of an awakening for Joy and watches it bloom, in a sensitive, sometimes too on-the-nose manner. Shortly after the yippie run-in, Joy is informed that her pregnancy threatens her life. The hospital rejects her appeal for a “therapeutic termination”; in an example of Call Jane hammering home the point, the all-male hospital board discuss her life in front of Joy as if she’s invisible, immaterial, silent. Will, a status quo guy, feels resigned to their decision. Joy, incensed and unleashed, calls “Jane”, a number for pregnant women who are “anxious”, plastered on flyers around town.
Thus Joy is initiated into the Jane Collective, and Call Jane into a restrained, though sharper than it could’ve been, ode to heroism of the past acts of radical generosity and courage which could hold a dark echo for the future, as Roe v Wade rests on the supreme court’s chopping block this year.