In May, President Donald Trump instructed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to impose a ban on foreign-made equipment, much of it from China, that might pose a security threat to the U.S. Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, characterizes the new U.S. policy as “bullying” and called it a threat to “liberal, laws-based order.” Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss Chinese hacking of the 2012 American election and decades of intellectual theft, and China’s response to the Trump Administration’s “nuclear option” in the trade war.

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There’s a theoretical aspect to Joanna Hogg’s urgent and ambitious autobiographical drama, “The Souvenir,” along with its dramatic one; but, far from reinforcing each other, these two aspects are in conflict—neither wins, but both are weakened. It’s set mainly in London, in the early nineteen-eighties, when Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a young filmmaker and film student in her early twenties, encounters a man named Anthony (Tom Burke), who’s about ten years older and much worldlier than she is. It’s a movie about love and art in which Hogg’s strong identification with the protagonist takes the place of psychology and self-examination, and a movie about memory in which little in the action suggests any effort to recover the past. The effect is a peculiar one—a vast framework of ideas and experience gives rise to an anecdotal movie, one that’s much less audacious than the inspiration that gave rise to them.

Anthony works—or claims to work—for the Foreign Office, and claims to be working on dossiers of critical political moment. He’s a former art student ablaze with artistic talent and passion, a dandy with a fine wardrobe, an intellectual with a flamboyantly aphoristic manner, and—at first unbeknownst to Julie—a heroin addict. Julie maintains a close relationship with her parents, especially her mother (Tilda Swinton, who is Swinton Byrne’s real-life mother), and attempts to make progress in her art, conceiving a project and enrolling in film school. Anthony’s critical sensibility, despite its harshness, helps her along, even as the stresses of their relationship distract her from school and fray her nerves.

Hogg’s most notable accomplishment is in her calibration of the lead performances, which are quasi-theatrical yet distinctively cinematic. Swinton Byrne, who has never had a major movie role before, endows Julie with a quietly tremulous sense of self-doubt and inquisitive yearning—as well as a deer-in-the-headlights gaze at Anthony’s distantly lurid brilliance and aggressive emotional provocations. In Burke’s performance, Hogg brings out Anthony’s ravaged superciliousness, a noble and ornate façade of exquisite refinement that’s on the verge of shattering under the pressure of his addiction and the deceptions and ignominies that it entails.

What’s more, Hogg catches crucial differences between Julie (along with the rest of her film-school entourage) and Anthony, by way of both wardrobe and gesture. Anthony’s exquisite clothing and manners—including the muted monochrome of his voice—stand out from the unpondered spontaneity of the scruffier students. But most important, Anthony embodies an entire collective history in the tense control of his behavior; he’s completely still, unless and except when he wants to move, whereas Julie and her other friends are fidgety, loosely strung, and uncontrolled. Hogg’s sense of casting proves decisive; Swinton Byrne’s on-camera inexperience and lack of theatrical training lends her a searching uncertainty that’s a crucial emotional element of the drama.

That drama, however, proves far less substantial and less considered than the casting and direction of actors. Knowing that I’d soon be seeing “The Souvenir,” I deliberately avoided reading my colleague Rebecca Mead’s recent profile of Hogg, in order to avoid comparing the specifics of Hogg’s life story while contemplating the version of it that she places onscreen. I didn’t have more than a general notion of the movie’s connection to Hogg’s personal life, but, as I watched the movie, I nonetheless sensed that it was a very slight and narrow representation of the protagonist’s experience—that it reflected much less than Hogg knew or could have imagined about Julie. The film is conspicuously inscribed in the concept of memory and the transformation of personal experience into art. Yet Hogg never dramatizes her access to the elements of her inner life or any struggle for engagement with it. The film offers no sense of searching for memories or grasping at its details or its import. Hogg’s proximity to her earlier self seems complete and total; there’s no cinematic device to suggest a present-tense filmmaker reaching back to an earlier stage of her own life and art.

Hogg’s identification with Julie seems just about total—Julie is in just about every scene in the film, she’s often the only person in a given scene, and she’s the only character with any subjective sequences at all. But there are very few point-of-view shots showing what Julie sees, very little attention paid to her inner experience. (For instance, when she first talks with Anthony, there’s no frontal view of his face; when Julie is on the phone, what she’s hearing from the person on the other end of the line is never heard; what she’s reading when she opens her mail isn’t disclosed, and neither is what she’s seeing while taking photographs with her 35-mm. S.L.R. or shooting film with her handheld 16-mm. movie camera.) Hogg depicts Julie from the outside, mainly detaching herself from Julie’s point of view but never standing far enough outside to reveal any curiosity about Julie’s thoughts or state of mind. And it isn’t only psychology that’s missing from “The Souvenir”; the film also lacks a basic interest in how Julie responds to situations—what she does in crucial moments of her life—or how she responds to her relationship with Anthony.

Many tense and conflict-riddled scenes between Julie and Anthony are cut dismayingly short just as they’re getting going, inviting dramatizations that Hogg never provides. For instance, Anthony speaks abusively to Julie, calling her “a freak” because of her “fragility,” adding, “You’re lost and you’ll always be lost.” What is Julie’s response? It isn’t shown. Likewise, Hogg cuts away after Anthony criticizes Julie’s film-school application. On a luxurious Venice jaunt with Anthony, Julie sits in a posh hotel and weeps, for good reason. But when Anthony demands that she cheer up because he finds her sadness “punishing,” Hogg cuts away again to a later event, as they head to the opera. After Julie—finding Anthony’s drug paraphernalia and seeing his many needle marks—orders him out of the apartment, Hogg cuts away again, rather than film his response and their confrontation.

The real-life Hogg comes off, in Mead’s piece, as a voluble storyteller, describing her copious cache of notebooks, letters, and diaries dating from the time of her life that the movie covers, and also recordings of therapy sessions in which she discusses that time. She also tells some noteworthy stories that provide the context and the background for the film—but they’re exactly the kind of moments that Hogg elides. Julie’s apartment, in the film, is what Mead calls “an inch-by-inch reconstruction of Hogg’s elegant student digs,” complete with furnishings that belonged to the filmmaker at the time, such as a grand, ornate bed that turns up in Julie’s apartment midway through the movie. Hogg explains that she had such a bed and that she and the real-life version of Anthony had bought it at auction; yet the movie offers no such rationale, no such grace note of the characters’ relationship. As a result, the film offers the viewer not a few excerpts from a full range of a life but merely the absence of what made it full. The very story of Hogg’s replication of her flat in a studio—for that matter, imagining her work with the production designer and set decorators to realize it—offers a more powerful evocation of the pull of memory than anything in the film.

The movie’s idiosyncratic composition, comprising many static takes that deliver the action with a plain reserve, doesn’t so much fragment the action enigmatically as reduce it to anecdotes and information. The bold and admirable act of will that it took to make the film is distinct from the aesthetic willfulness with which it was made. A far more conventional director might have been inclined to ask more questions of the script, to show more of the action, to reveal more about the characters, and, as a result, to make a more engaging and insightful movie. In that sense, “The Souvenir” reveals the pitfalls of classic auteur cinema, the concept of the screenwriter-director who relates her own experience by way of dramatic fiction. Hogg knows the story as no one else does; her authority is, in the literal sense, unimpeachable. It may be her very intimacy with the subject of the film that leaves her incurious about it—she offers a daring and heartfelt view of her own life but, in delivering it, leaves it unexplored. In the end, “The Souvenir” is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience.

I’ve never had an abortion. In this, I am like most American women. A frequently quoted statistic from a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, which reports that one in four women will have an abortion before the age of forty-five, may strike you as high, but it means that a large majority of women never need to end a pregnancy. (Indeed, the abortion rate has been declining for decades, although it’s disputed how much of that decrease is due to better birth control, and wider use of it, and how much to restrictions that have made abortions much harder to get.) Now that the Supreme Court seems likely to overturn Roe v. Wade sometime in the next few years—Alabama has passed a near-total ban on abortion, and Ohio, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Missouri have passed “heartbeat” bills that, in effect, ban abortion later than six weeks of pregnancy, and any of these laws, or similar ones, could prove the catalyst—I wonder if women who have never needed to undergo the procedure, and perhaps believe that they never will, realize the many ways that the legal right to abortion has undergirded their lives.

Legal abortion means that the law recognizes a woman as a person. It says that she belongs to herself. Most obviously, it means that a woman has a safe recourse if she becomes pregnant as a result of being raped. (Believe it or not, in some states, the law allows a rapist to sue for custody or visitation rights.) It means that doctors no longer need to deny treatment to pregnant women with certain serious conditions—cancer, heart disease, kidney disease—until after they’ve given birth, by which time their health may have deteriorated irretrievably. And it means that non-Catholic hospitals can treat a woman promptly if she is having a miscarriage. (If she goes to a Catholic hospital, she may have to wait until the embryo or fetus dies. In one hospital, in Ireland, such a delay led to the death of a woman named Savita Halappanavar, who contracted septicemia. Her case spurred a movement to repeal that country’s constitutional amendment banning abortion.)

The legalization of abortion, though, has had broader and more subtle effects than limiting damage in these grave but relatively uncommon scenarios. The revolutionary advances made in the social status of American women during the nineteen-seventies are generally attributed to the availability of oral contraception, which came on the market in 1960. But, according to a 2017 study by the economist Caitlin Knowles Myers, “The Power of Abortion Policy: Re-Examining the Effects of Young Women’s Access to Reproductive Control,” published in the Journal of Political Economy, the effects of the Pill were offset by the fact that more teens and women were having sex, and so birth-control failure affected more people. Complicating the conventional wisdom that oral contraception made sex risk-free for all, the Pill was also not easy for many women to get. Restrictive laws in some states barred it for unmarried women and for women under the age of twenty-one. The Roe decision, in 1973, afforded thousands upon thousands of teen-agers a chance to avoid early marriage and motherhood. Myers writes, “Policies governing access to the pill had little if any effect on the average probabilities of marrying and giving birth at a young age. In contrast, policy environments in which abortion was legal and readily accessible by young women are estimated to have caused a 34 percent reduction in first births, a 19 percent reduction in first marriages, and a 63 percent reduction in ‘shotgun marriages’ prior to age 19.”

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm. She could dream bigger dreams. Under the old rules, inculcated from girlhood, if a woman got pregnant at a young age, she married her boyfriend; and, expecting early marriage and kids, she wouldn’t have invested too heavily in her education in any case, and she would have chosen work that she could drop in and out of as family demands required.

In 1970, the average age of first-time American mothers was younger than twenty-two. Today, more women postpone marriage until they are ready for it. (Early marriages are notoriously unstable, so, if you’re glad that the divorce rate is down, you can, in part, thank Roe.) Women can also postpone childbearing until they are prepared for it, which takes some serious doing in a country that lacks paid parental leave and affordable childcare, and where discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is still widespread. For all the hand-wringing about lower birth rates, most women—eighty-six per cent of them—still become mothers. They just do it later, and have fewer children.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields. It was female lawyers, for example, who brought cases that opened up good blue-collar jobs to women. Without more women obtaining law degrees, would men still be shaping all our legislation? Without the large numbers of women who have entered the medical professions, would psychiatrists still be telling women that they suffered from penis envy and were masochistic by nature? Would women still routinely undergo unnecessary hysterectomies? Without increased numbers of women in academia, and without the new field of women’s studies, would children still be taught, as I was, that, a hundred years ago this month, Woodrow Wilson “gave” women the vote? There has been a revolution in every field, and the women in those fields have led it.

It is frequently pointed out that the states passing abortion restrictions and bans are states where women’s status remains particularly low. Take Alabama. According to one study, by almost every index—pay, workforce participation, percentage of single mothers living in poverty, mortality due to conditions such as heart disease and stroke—the state scores among the worst for women. Children don’t fare much better: according to U.S. News rankings, Alabama is the worst state for education. It also has one of the nation’s highest rates of infant mortality (only half the counties have even one ob-gyn), and it has refused to expand Medicaid, either through the Affordable Care Act or on its own. Only four women sit in Alabama’s thirty-five-member State Senate, and none of them voted for the ban. Maybe that’s why an amendment to the bill proposed by State Senator Linda Coleman-Madison was voted down. It would have provided prenatal care and medical care for a woman and child in cases where the new law prevents the woman from obtaining an abortion. Interestingly, the law allows in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that often results in the discarding of fertilized eggs. As Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s chief sponsor in the state senate, put it, “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant.” In other words, life only begins at conception if there’s a woman’s body to control.

Indifference to women and children isn’t an oversight. This is why calls for better sex education and wider access to birth control are non-starters, even though they have helped lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies, which is the cause of abortion. The point isn’t to prevent unwanted pregnancy. (States with strong anti-abortion laws have some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the country; Alabama is among them.) The point is to roll back modernity for women.

So, if women who have never had an abortion, and don’t expect to, think that the new restrictions and bans won’t affect them, they are wrong. The new laws will fall most heavily on poor women, disproportionately on women of color, who have the highest abortion rates and will be hard-pressed to travel to distant clinics.

But without legal, accessible abortion, the assumptions that have shaped all women’s lives in the past few decades—including that they, not a torn condom or a missed pill or a rapist, will decide what happens to their bodies and their futures—will change. Women and their daughters will have a harder time, and there will be plenty of people who will say that they were foolish to think that it could be otherwise.