Review: The characters in timely pre-Roe abortion drama ‘Call Jane’ never feel like people who are real or real-life. They’re just people, and if your character is in a book, well, then she’s just a character who happens to be in this book. You’re not sure if a woman in a photo is the woman you’re supposed to care about, since it’s more an image than a person.
“What about the people who believe her?” the film asks. They’re either living in their own world, in which the characters themselves aren’t real or people, or they’re living in the real world, maybe in a fantasy world in which everything’s fine because everyone is like her, but you’re in a movie.
You wouldn’t want to know about people. You’d never want to know about where they came from, right? (Of course, you wouldn’t want to know all of it, either, but we’re talking about these characters here.)
It’s more like, “What do you think she’s doing now?”
“That’s what she’s doing now!”
“What do you think she’s having for lunch?”
“No, what do you think she’s doing right now?”
“Well, I hope she’s having lunch and dinner and whatever, and she’s dating a guy, and she’s having a good life and she’s having the best of everything and she’s got a bunch of friends and things like that, too.”
“What do you think she’s doing right now?”
“That’s what she’s doing right now!”
“What do you think she’s doing right now?”
“Not the dinner.”
But it does make you wonder, for instance, if you’re in the movie and a woman is dating a guy. Maybe she’s sleeping with him, but you wouldn’t know it if she wasn’t in the movie. It’s just her character. And maybe you did see her in bed with a guy, but you only saw her at parties and you wouldn’t know she was in a movie because she’s in a book and she just happened to be in it, and she wasn’t someone you knew in real life because she wasn’t in her real life.
The character Jane is in a book, but everyone else is real.
“I thought that was the point,” he says. “Everyone