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| Director Audrey Diwan |
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| Diwan with actress Anamaria Vartolomei |
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| novelist Annie Ernaux in her youth |
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| Annie Ernaux today |
HAPPENING (L’événement) B+ France (100 mi) 2021 d: Audrey Diwan
I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me. I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy. Maybe I’m afraid that the act of writing will shatter this vision, just like sexual fantasies fade as soon as we have climaxed. — Annie Ernaux, awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, from her 2000 novel Happening (L’événement), Happening - Page 57 - Google Books Result
An autobiographical memory piece, a searing social drama with a riveting script and feminist sense of urgency, adapted by Diwan and Marcia Romano from the 2000 novel by the same name from Annie Ernaux, author of more than twenty works of fiction and memoir, considered by many to be France’s most important writer, awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature a year after this film was released “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” A blisteringly intense look back at the early 60’s when the pill did not exist and abortion was still a crime in France, a leftover relic from the Vichy government twenty years after the death of Marie-Louise Giraud, a woman guillotined for practicing abortion (France executed abortionist Marie-Louise Giraud by guillotine.), this is an era of stolen youth, recalling the harrowing journey of a young woman whose path was riddled by Kafkaesque authoritative obstacles that left her on the brink of death. Historical and frighteningly topical, recounted with uncanny accuracy, the film documents one woman’s indefatigable quest for an illegal abortion in order to pursue her academic studies, with the author emphasizing the horrid physicality and undercurrent of violence in the law, “If I don’t relate this experience in detail, I am helping to obscure the reality of women’s lives and making myself an accomplice to male domination of the world.” In a few short years, the chants on the streets of Paris would be “Egalité! Liberte! Sexualité!” (Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité!: Paris, May 1968 | The Independent). Very early in her career, Ernaux turned away from fiction to focus on autobiography, as this account was written forty years later, still traumatized by the event, sifting through memories and journal entries, providing clarity to the complicated, writing about things that are impossible to speak about, yet that era of impossibility has been thrust into the future of young women in America with the Supreme Court overturning freedom of choice in June 2022, with Oregon Governor Kate Brown announcing in response, “You cannot ban abortion. You can only ban safe abortions.” (Oregon political leaders react to end of Roe v. Wade - OPB). Under a new wave of conservatism, abortion has again become one of the main subjects of passionate ideological controversies in the western democracies, as women’s bodies are once again threatened by the unspeakable power a man and a regressive society can hold over a woman. Removing safe access to legal abortions leaves only unsafe avenues to pursue, typically with no anaesthetic, a sticky path no one wants to take, where it’s important to note that worldwide, even today, 68,000 women die of unsafe abortion every year, while 5 million more will suffer long-term health complications. Recalling similar films addressing the same issue, Agnès Varda’s ONE SINGS, THE OTHER DOESN’T (1976), Claude Chabrol’s THE STORY OF WOMEN (1988), Mike Leigh’s VERA DRAKE (2004), Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile) (2007), Eliza Hittman’s 2020 Top Ten List #5 Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s LINGUI, THE SACRED BONDS (2021), this may be the most subjectively brutalizing. As opposed to the other abortion dramas, this one is actually about the plight of women, made in close consultation with the author, elevated by the relentlessly personal performance of French-Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei who is in nearly every frame of the film, which unanimously won the Golden Lion (1st Place) at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, while Vartolomei won the César Award for Most Promising Actress. Yet it’s the appearance of French actress Sandrine Bonnaire as her mother that really surprises, breaking into the industry at the age of 16 with her explosive debut in Maurice Pialat’s À Nos Amours (To Our Loves) (1983), also winning the César Award for Most Promising Actress, a film Diwan told her actors to watch before filming began, along with Andrea Arnold’s FISH TANK (2009). Bonnaire also worked with Agnès Varda in Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) (1985), one of her most defiantly bold roles, a woman hitchhiking alone through a cold wintry landscape, as this film similarly captures the bleak emptiness of a woman’s journey through a different kind of winter wasteland, one that exists in the chilly bastion of middle class privilege where sought-after freedoms are supposedly the hallmark of a cultured and civilized French society, yet under the veneer of promised hope, undeniable horrors abound like dirty little secrets, with the professor offering a nationalist, patriotic reference before the taking of university final exams, “I hope these words by Victor Hugo will show you the way, dear students.”
We shall keep the honor.
The rest, we shall give away.
And we walk.
Our eyes, indignant.
Our foreheads, pale.
On them, we read: Faith, courage, drought.
The troops continue their route.
Heads high, raising their flag,
holy rags.
In 1963, Anne Duchesne (Ernaux’s maiden name) is a promising French student in Angoulême on the verge of taking her university final exams (the same town where Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch was filmed), yet in the areas outside Paris especially, the country remains deeply conservative and Catholic, existing under a lens of misogyny and shame, where it wasn’t until the Veil Act of 1975, two years after the United States, seven years after Great Britain, and almost 50 years after Sweden, that France finally legalized abortion, a word that is never mentioned in the book or the film. Anne’s life as a university student is relatively carefree, living in a woman’s dormitory with shared showers and meals in a cafeteria, with young women getting their first taste of freedom away from home, exuding a sense of liberated confidence, with Anne exceling at school, where her tastes and interests are typical of a young woman in the 60’s, a reader of Sartre, Beauvoir, Aragon, and Kafka, with a promising future as a literary professor, though it later changes to becoming a writer. Lying on the beach in the company of her friends Hélène (Luàna Bajrami) and Brigitte (Louise Orry-Diquéro), they exude in the summertime bliss of Éric Rohmer’s PAULINE AT THE BEACH (1983) or A Summer's Tale (Conte d'été) (1996), where youthful characters playfully obsess over romantic relationships and soak in the world around them with a kind of innocent curiosity, as if they’ll never grow old, all but certain that a bright future awaits them (made possible by the widespread availability of contraception), while Rohmer’s BOYFRIENDS AND GIRLFRIENDS (1987) actually takes place in Ernaux’s home town of Cergy-Pontoise. Veering away from the established template, however, Diwan shows Anne checking her underwear for blood, as her period is five weeks late, something altogether unimaginable in a young girl’s life, and when a local doctor determines she’s pregnant, she goes into an emotional tailspin with her world suddenly turned upside down, her hopes and dreams evaporating, as she embarks on a lonely struggle that is as painful as it is intimate. “Time was no longer a series of days that had to be filled with lessons and papers, but had become the formless thing that was growing inside me,” says the book. Unable to concentrate in class, her mind is simply elsewhere, thoroughly confounded by existing laws which prevent doctors from helping, where she’s even sabotaged by one physician under the guise that he’s being helpful, but he’s not, tricking her into believing the medicine he’s giving her will induce a miscarriage, only to discover much later that it actually strengthens the embryo in order to protect it against any attempted abortion. Remember, this is the era before the Internet, where there was a pervasive ignorance of basic biology, as you had to go to the library and do your own research, often relying upon outdated information. Told in chapter headings identifying the number of weeks she is pregnant, they escalate in rapid succession, which only heightens her increasing anxiety. Initially keeping things completely to herself, she grows progressively more desperate, yet when she reaches out to her friends, they quickly abandon her, with Brigitte telling the more sympathetic Hélène, “It’s not our problem. You want to go to prison with her?” This stunning rejection leaves her a bit stupefied, particularly the way she is immediately categorized as an irresponsible and promiscuous woman, a stain on her reputation suddenly marked by shame, turning to a male friend Jean (Kacey Mottet Klein) who may have experience in the area, but his response is to try to sexually take advantage of her, a jarring revelation that might seem cringeworthy if it wasn’t such a typical male reaction. She tracks down the perspective father in nearby Bordeaux, but his shock is that she hasn’t already taken care of the matter, remaining oblivious to her concerns, absolving himself of any responsibility, with the unsympathetic men in the film thinking only of themselves, conveniently sidestepping the reality, as it’s not happening to them, yet her lack of support, even from other women, is equally damning.
What’s perhaps most surprising is that her professor (Pio Marmaï) doesn’t take more of an interest, fully aware of her abrupt change in demeanor, one of his best students suddenly disinterested and apathetic in the classroom, leaving her all alone as well. While she regularly makes visits to her family back home in a small town from the provinces, they are working class parents who run a bar, their lives overrun by economic concerns, living vicariously through their daughter’s educational success with the promise of a better future, something they never had, with her mother wondering what her life could have been like if she hadn’t been preoccupied by physically demanding, poorly paid work while also raising her child, so Anne never mentions a word, completely hiding her situation, as succeeding at the university level offers her the chance of class mobility. In an act of desperation, she resorts to diabolical measures, attempting to abort the pregnancy herself with a knitting needle, but is unsuccessful, with her remaining choices only growing more gruesome. While she sees a slew of doctors, always male, yet despite asking for help, she is told that “the law is unsparing and the methods are not safe. Every month a girl tries her luck and dies in extreme pain,” while Hélène warns her not to end up in a hospital, where it’s a lottery, “If you’re lucky, it’s labeled a ‘miscarriage,’ but if some bastard doctor writes ‘abortion,’ and you don’t die, you end up in prison.” What follows is a painfully graphic purgatory that exists only for women, characterized by an unembellished objectivity, where Anne has a wonderfully literary way of expressing her temporary malaise in class, suggesting she was struck by “The illness that only strikes women and turns them into housewives.” What really stands out is the existential loneliness of her experience, her self-confidence shattered, abandoned by friends and a society that invokes criminalization by threatening prison, where the only choices left are increasingly cruel and barbaric, leaving nothing to the imagination, with Laurent Tangy’s distinctly verité handheld camera never leaving her side, nestled close to her shoulder, stuck to her like a vice grip, clinging to her facial expressions, which only accentuate the suffocating emotional claustrophobia, offering viewers no relief. The fact that an ordinary, everyday story is as exciting as a psychological thriller without resorting to sensationalism is due to Vartolomei’s restrained acting and the director’s decision to use a narrow 4:3 format, as we’re forced to endure the utter incomprehension and unfathomability of the experience, following her rhythm and her gaze, where every moment is an exasperated disappointment. While there’s a considerable amount of psychological territory compacted into this resolutely concise film, told in a very straightforward manner, it feels like a frontal assault to the senses, where it might be surprising to learn that the book that it's based on is only 95 pages, though the visceral quality of the film allows male viewers to put themselves in a woman’s shoes, as it physically evokes the horrifying experience of millions of women. There is a particularly eerie musical score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine that adds a percussive-like tension throughout, never intruding or overshadowing, but effectively adds an interior element of paranoia and dread. While abortion is often reduced to an escalating moral issue of competing political ideologies, pro-life or pro-choice, it’s really about freedom, something universal to the core, and a woman’s right to make her own choices without the restrictive interventions of the state removing that right, where this is an unsentimentalized yet exasperatingly disturbing self-portrait of one woman’s odyssey into a heart-wrenching labyrinth of dead ends that leave her increasingly at risk, a reminder of the savagery inflicted on millions of girls and women, ultimately becoming a manifesto of self-determination.
