CHENNAI: I do not believe there exists a ‘Workshop of the Backstreet Abortionist’ in any museum in the world,” says French writer Annie Ernaux in her memoir L’événement, which speaks about her own abortion. Filmmaker Céline Sciamma has cited this as the inspiration for a sequence in her film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The scene has the female leads taking their friend to seek an abortion and once they return home deciding to record what had just happened as a painting.
While watching it, I remember thinking, “There might be no museum with a frame titled ‘The Abortion’, there may be no simulation of a abortionist’s workshop that exists anywhere but here in Portrait of a Lady on Fire is one scene that has created a frame of an abortion and imagined what an abortionist’s workspace could have been like in the late eighteenth century.” It seems to me then that Sciamma, in making a movie with an abortion scene, like many new age museums are wont to do, has registered seldom spoken about stories, and by portraying has affirmed the experiences of those who would have suffered silently.
The scene helps today’s viewers visualise how an abortion may have been sought in those times and this, I think, makes Sciamma’s movie in itself a museum — the kind that Ernaux bemoaned the lack of. Any movie has the potential to be a museum aka an archive of the details that dictate a time period. But where museums are usually thought of as irrelevant and uninteresting, I knew that it was too much to ask for a commercial movie to double up as a museum.
I harboured the hope that even if it is not what Sciamma did for Ernaux, someone will come along in Tamil cinema to do right by the women who have had abortions. My bar was low — once in a while, I wanted the women I have supported in seeking an abortion to have their stories depicted on screen. I assumed Netrikann, made by the man whose ‘reading woman’ in Aval I have raved about, with lady superstar Nayanthara playing the lead, to be the abortion-film I had been waiting for. The film had so much else going for it but was a terrible disappointment on the account of abortions.
It uses the usual tropes — the ‘mistake’ of having sex, the runaway boyfriend, the clueless woman with no support, information or access to care. It emphasises the shame and stigma associated with abortions that lead to women having unsafe ones. It has a single line description for women who seek abortions — young person who has had premarital sex, fuses all women who need abortions into one large category — bad, and through the story, punishes the women who seek an abortion before defending their choice to have one. Of course, stereotypes exist because they’ve been true. Just last week, a migrant labourer in the city died following an attempt to self-induce an abortion.
But stereotypes continue to exist because they sell. College-educated, moviegoing, smartphone-using women today are more confident, have more information and access to care than ever before contrary to the film’s portrayal of them as unaware, unsupported and gullible. A lay person may be in the dark about the legality of abortions, but an Internet search is the first thing a person wanting to have one is likely to do. How they found the agent in the film is unclear, but the top hits for ‘Safe Abortion’ are legit ones.
This makes me wonder if we will ever see films catch up with the truths of our times or continue to exist in a timewarp, peddling convenient half-truths; Will filmmakers do their bit to make the untrue portrayal of abortions history so feminists can focus on making unsafe abortions history? After watching Netrikann, I am no longer dreaming of movies being museums or repositories of varied experiences. I just ask that movies exercising creative freedom to show skewed realities also take the responsibility for setting the record straight by pointing to resources in the case of an issue like abortions, that is just as life-threatening as liquor drinking or smoking.
If I cannot have women presented with choices on screen, if the possibilities that fiction promises cannot manifest as plots, I will simply pray for text cards at the end to read like this: Since 1971, abortions have been legal in India; abortions can be had before sunset and at regular hospitals and clinics; all abortions do not require seekers to be in hospital gowns, legs spread, lying down on a table — early pregnancies are ended using tablets; if you need support to access an abortion reach out to the Safe Abortion Network.