As one of the women that Paula Cury speaks to in “Scarlet Girls” says towards the end of the heartrending doc, “Every time I talk about it, it’s like I’m letting go a little more,” passing the burden of what they experienced as a result of adhering to the Dominican Republic’s total ban on abortion to those that have the power to force a reconsideration as debate opens on the floor of Congress on laws that have been in place since 1884. When the same woman adds, “They don’t know what it feels like,” Cury offers a powerful corrective when creating a sensorial experience around their testimony, matching the words that would stop you in your tracks with arresting imagery of the world they inhabit as they talk about the unthinkable physical and psychological pain from the pregnancies they were forced to carry to term under terrible circumstances.
In disconnecting the audio of the five women she interviews from the visuals, Cury gets at another kind of truth in giving glimpses of their daily lives to illustrate how they’ve had to carry on after unimaginable trauma with the momentum of their routine preventing them on lingering too much on what happened to them. Varying in age from teenagers still in school to women in their thirties and forties, the participants describe the aftermath of unwanted pregnancies, from a young girl who was raped by her stepfather in her sleep to the mother of a leukemia patient that couldn’t receive the treatment she needed until after giving birth, but was unlikely to give birth given her condition, resulting in a true Catch-22.
The descriptions are vivid – and perhaps unbearable in the horrors they relay if not for Cury’s deft aesthetic reorientation of the senses – and rather than be a distraction from the words, the quotidian scenes from settings such as a classroom or a hair salon offer an ineffable context without direct illustration of the matters at hand, observing the conditions that inform the choices – or lack thereof – that the women had to make about their pregnancies and Cury elegantly moves across a social strata from seemingly the poorest of neighborhoods to the tourist destinations to witness the effects at every level of society. (A particularly striking sequence involves a woman enjoying a spa day as she recalls the doctor performing her abortion without anesthetic.)
The frank interviews cut through any artifice that Cury imposes, as the ongoing political fight for reproductive rights in government can be heard in drips and drabs over the radio or on a TV that sits in the back of a salon. The fact that it only seems like male speakers make it up to the podium to give impassioned speeches in those interstitials make the sober reflection of the women who likely go about their days in silence stand out all the more and although an early scene with a teacher giving a lesson in abstinence might come across as a little over the top, the film settles into an organic rhythm where both the subject and the viewer can be comfortable enough to engage. When Cury largely refrains from identifying any speakers and organizes the film – mostly gracefully – as a baton pass, some mild confusion may occasionally set in, but the idea of a collective voice comes to feel right in confronting a culture in which women everywhere have substantially less agency than men and the decision to come forward with personal stories will spare others from having to revisit the trauma of sharing theirs. What’s detailed may be unimaginable, but “Scarlet Girls” opens minds by opening up the space for perspectives that often have been pushed off into the margins, invested admirably and equally in creating the room to speak and to listen.
“Scarlet Girls” will screen again at SXSW on March 17th at 6 pm at Alamo Lamar 2 and March 18th at 6:15 pm at Alamo Lamar 9.