When I watch an old movie, I know how everything turned out. Not just the plot. I know how important the movie became. I know where the actors’ careers went. I even know when the actors died.

I also know how all the concerns a movie might have raised resolved themselves. I watch Great Depression movies knowing that we got out of the Great Depression. I watch World War II movies knowing that the good guys eventually won. And I can’t watch “Serpico” or “Dog Day Afternoon” without being aware that, a few decades later, New York was a much safer place.

因此,我开发了一个反射exive tendency to watch new movies through the same lens, imagining myself as someone in the future looking back at the concerns and anxieties expressed in the movies of our time. But, of course, I can’t do that with much accuracy because I can’t really know what people in the future will think or be like.

For example, I’ve seen plenty of movies in which a woman gets pregnant in the days before abortion was legal, and it’s a calamity. She’s forced to go to some butcher abortionist, or to marry some idiot. Or she ends up accidentally killing herself using a coat hanger, which, as I recently learned, is how my great-grandmother died in 1907.

I’d been wondering why, on my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, where nonagenarians are rampant, I had a great-grandmother who died when she was 33. Now I know. Apparently, my great-grandfather, who was by all accounts a monster, didn’t want any more kids — they had two — so he insisted that she take care of the situation. She did, and died of blood poisoning.

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But one thing that never occurred to me as I watched movies depicting the hardships of the distant past is the thought that the past could comeback. I never imagined my future self thinking, “They thought this was over with. But now all this stuff is happening again.”

Abortion has always been a difficult topic for movies, because movies like happy endings. If a woman wants to have a baby and has a baby, that’s a happy ending. But if a woman wants to have an abortion and gets an abortion, that’s a sober event. It can’t be anything but sober. Make it happy and you have something crass. Make it tragic and it’s a political statement.

But in the past few years, two filmmakers have figured out how to make compelling dramas out of abortion stories. There was Eliza Hitman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” in 2020, and now Audrey Diwan’s“Happening,”a French-language film that opened in select U.S. theaters on Friday, May 13.

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“Never Rarely Sometimes Always” was the next-to-last film I saw before 2020’s COVID-19 lockdown. It was released into theaters that March and almost immediately pulled before finding a home on video on demand. It’s a precise, measured, well-acted film about a teenage girl in present-day Pennsylvania who, to get an abortion, has to leave her small town to go to New York City, where she spends the night riding the subways because she can’t afford a hotel.

“Happening,” meanwhile, is set in the early 1960s, more than a decade before abortion became legal in France. Based on the memoir of author Anne Ernaux, it’s the story of an outstanding college student who gets pregnant, wants an abortion and ends up having a series of harrowing, bloody experiences.

For me, these movies bookend this pandemic era. At the beginning of the pandemic, we all more or less hoped that we’d eventually return to the world of 2019. Two years later, that seems like a humble, almost pathetically modest goal.

After all, right now we have people in our country working overtime to take us back to 1950—and they might be succeeding.

These are both exceptional films, written, acted and directed by women and dealing with a subject directly concerning women. They were worth seeing months ago. Today, with the overturn of Roe v. Wade appearing imminent,they’re practically mandatory viewing.