This elegantly written and extensively researched book thoughtfully dissects cultural and political framings of motherhood in 1960s’ British and French film. The comparative approach, which throws into relief the specificities of each national context as well as their similarities, invites a wider perspective on the key questions and issues addressed here: What does it mean to be a mother in 1960s’ Britain and France? Who can or should be a mother? Who has the right to decide to be a mother or not? How does film engage with these questions, and why does it matter that it does?

Through a series of fascinating and sensitive discussions of how films associated with the French New Wave and British social realist cinema engage with motherhood, pregnancy and abortion, Oliver-Powell reveals the political scaffolding beneath these representations at a crucial period in the development of reproductive legislation and rights. These discussions are arranged in three sections: “Conception”, which focuses on the ideological construction of motherhood and maternity in relation to the central figure of the child-as-subject; “Gestation”, which considers the representation of unplanned pregnancies, abortion and reproductive rights; and finally “Delivery”, which explores experiences that sit outside “mainstream European ideological mothering constructions”, with a particular focus on the “intersection of race, motherhood and family” and the “presence of queer identities within familial discourse” (p. 29).

A key contention of the book is that “mothering subjects” are largely absent, not only in the films of this time, but also in public debates on birth rates and access to contraception and abortion. These may have focused attention on motherhood and maternity, but actual mothers – or indeed children – are rarely present. Oliver-Powell situates screen representations of maternity in relation to the terms of these debates, revealing a determination to depoliticise maternity and cling on to patriarchal maternal myths. As a result, screen mothers are idealized or demonized figures, seen only in relation to their (male) children.

“Pepsi and the Pill” is a welcome addition to a growing body of work that offers feminist and intersectional critiques of a type of cinema that has long been lionized for its depictions of “real life”, associated with youth, realist aesthetics and the desires of auteur-directors. It offers an important contribution to this scholarship, showing how circumscribed the “real life” depicted in many of these films is, with their often “masculine singular” perspective1, their presumption of heterosexuality and their overwhelming whiteness. Even where LGBTQ+ or Black characters are present (more frequently in the British than the French films discussed, as Oliver-Powell’s study reveals), they are hardly ever protagonists (a rare exception is “Victim” [Deardon, 1961]), and are almost always sidelined by the end of the film, eclipsed by a frequently unconvincing narrative turn.

One recurring reference in “Pepsi and the Pill” is Lee Edelman’s “No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive”.2 Oliver-Powell engages fruitfully with Edelman’s thesis of the construction of the “Child” as “a phantasmatic and ideological construct” (p. 6) in Western political discourse, the “ideal citizen” whose potential rights and entitlement serve only to limit those of real, actual citizens. Borrowing and extending Edelman’s concept of “reproductive futurity”, Oliver-Powell argues that this ideological framing of motherhood and heterosexuality as “fighting for the children” (p. 6) conflates with a desire to perpetuate existing forms of privilege. The imaginary “children” worth fighting for are, inevitably, constructed as male, heterosexual and white. Actual mothers and children – “the rich, complex experiences of mothering and the diverse individuals who engage in them” (p. 8) – are not only sidelined within this discourse, they are likely to be actively harmed by it.

Oliver-Powell also deploys Freudian theory as a tool for describing motherhood (myths and experiences) within patriarchal societies and cultures. By bringing Edelman’s notion of reproductive futurity into dialogue with feminist theory (Luce Irigaray, Adrienne Rich, Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir), she moves away from a universalizing approach to one which emphasizes “cultural futurity”, recognizing the “specific[ity] and exclusive[ity]” of ideological constructions that belong to “existing [Western] centres of social power” (p. 7). These myths are the bedrock on which patriarchal “cultural futurity” is built; “reproduction-as-cultural-repetition” (p. 200), as she puts it in her consideration of the protagonist’s decision to proceed with her pregnancy in the face of her family’s racist rejection of her Black partner and their future child in the French film “Les Lâches vivent d’espoir” (Claude Bernard-Aubert, 1961).

The film analyses frequently offer insightful new perspectives on well-known and/or hyper-canonical examples, but also shed light on less familiar titles. Jean-Luc Godard is a particular focus throughout the book, and a number of his films from “A bout de souffle” (1959) to “2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle” (1967) are productively interrogated, opening up a range of perspectives on popular culture, consumerism, sexuality and gender roles. For example, Chapter 1 brings Godard’s “Une femme mariée” (1964) into dialogue with Agnès Varda’s “Le Bonheur” (1965) as ironic commentaries on the commodification of femininity and motherhood. Chapter 5 considers two lesser-known French films from 1961, Francois Reichenbach’s “Un Coeur gros comme ça” and Bernard-Aubert’s “Les Lâches vivent d’espoir”, alongside an extended analysis of two African films – Ousmane Sembène’s “La Noire de…” (1966) and Med Hondo’s “Soleil Ô” (1969, given as 1967) – which address immigration from Senegal and Mauritania, respectively, to France. As Oliver-Powell argues, these films expose not only the representative limitations of the French and British films but also how “reproductive futurity” is framed as a “project, full of design and eugenic purpose” (p. 200). In this way, Oliver-Powell’s study intersects with feminist histories of the state-sanctioned abuse of women in French colonies, such as Françoise Vergès’s powerful account of enforced abortions (framed as “population control”) in La Réunion in 1969–70.3

The imbrication of maternity with class, race and national identity is also central in the consideration of certain stalwarts of the “kitchen sink” or Swinging London cycles – John Schlesinger’s “A Kind of Loving” (1962) and “Darling” (1965), Karel Reisz’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960), and Tony Richardson’s “A Taste of Honey” (1961) but also “Look Back in Anger” (1959) and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” (1962), for example. As Oliver-Powell points out, maternity is characterized in two main ways in these films – by middle-aged mothers of the wayward almost always male protagonists, or unmarried young women who find themselves pregnant. These representations are helpfully contextualized, for example in relation to sex education films and their discourses around young people’s sexuality, and especially perceptions around responsibility for pregnancy, and how these relate to agency and the “right to choose”. In chapters five and six, a focus on the presence of Black and queer secondary characters, notably in “A Taste of Honey” and “The L-Shaped Room” (Bryan Forbes, 1962), tests their potential for undermining presumptions of “cultural futurity”.

Faced with the current precarity of reproductive justice around the world and the undermining of LGBTQ+ rights, this is an important and extremely timely book. By revealing the political relationship between cinematic representations of mothers, motherhood and reproductive choices and the ideological, social and legislative frameworks that govern access to reproductive justice and family life, Oliver-Powell exposes the ethical imbrication of cinematic framings of maternity and the lived experiences of actual mothers and children in all their diversity.

Notes:
1 Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular. French New Wave Cinema. Translated by Kristin Ross, Durham 2008.
2 Lee Edelman, No Future. Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham 2004.
3 Françoise Vergès, Le Ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialisation, féminisme, Paris 2017.