“Happening” /“L’événent”: a film for our moment
Although set in early 1960s France, Audrey Diwan’s “Happening”/“L’événent” could not be more timely nor more important. It is at once a horror story, a warning, and masterpiece of depicting the very human, very real cost of denying women agency over their bodies (indeed, over their lives).
Adapted by Diwan and Marcia Romano from Annie Ernaux’s novel(1), the film evokes the waking nightmare for a young woman with an unwanted pregnancy in a world where she is condemned to give birth. There is no alternative. To even talk to a doctor about an abortion is to invite rebuke and censure. If the woman survives, she will be arrested. The resonance with our current climate in the United States surrounding access to abortion, reproductive healthcare for women, and the potential for turning back the clock on other aspects of societal progress over the past fifty or so years is unnerving. That the past is - or is likely to be - prologue, is frightening.
“I didn’t intend to make it a thriller, or a body horror movie, [but] it is because it’s reality.” Audrey Diwan (2)
Diwan approaches the story with a steady, if oneiric, gaze. It is at once an intimate narrative of a young woman with dreams and a future that are in danger of evaporating owing to tragic mistake as well as a near-Cronenbergian body horror movie. This is not to say Diwan traffics in shocking imagery, just that the horror - there’s no other word for it - of amateur abortion procedures is not shied away from. There is only one scene that is particularly graphic and it’s over with in a blink, but everything that preceded it renders it unavoidable.
Anne is a student in college whose professor sees a future colleague in her work (later, she tells him she’s no longer interested; she wants to be a writer - it’s easy to see why). The film is divided by the number of weeks into her pregnancy from the moment she misses her period. Anamaria Vartolomei’s face reflects the determination of this young woman to do whatever it takes to terminate the pregnancy and preserve her future. She is very painfully aware that she will lose her life and very likely resent or be unable to love the child if she carries it to term. Her friends abandon her and she says nothing to her parent (but in one particularly moving scene with her mother, the unspoken uncertainty of her future seems to flicker across her mother’s face (the truly great Sandrine Bonnaire).
The young man by whom she got pregnant, of course, wants nothing to do with this. Actually, no one she’s confided in does. Her solitude and isolation could not be more stark if she were adrift in outer space.
Anne’s performance slips as the weeks go on, has a one night stand with a fireman in town, and after being denied any recourse to termination by her doctor, consults another physician she looked up in the phone book who prescribes a medicine to induce her period. We later find that it was an “embryo strengthening” compound; we learn this because Anne attempted to perform her own procedure. To be sure, we see Anne prep the metal (is it a tube or a rod) for insertion, but the actual procedure is shot obliquely enough. Not enough, though, that you fear for her safety, and frankly, squirm in your seat.
Eventually, her friend Jean (a sympathetic Kacey Mottet Klein) puts her in touch with Laetitia who gives her the contact information of the woman who performed her abortion. Anne sells her belongings to pay for the procedure in one of a series of actions that reflect her determination to see her way through all this on her terms. Not that she has any options. She has no advocate, no one standing by her (though one could argue that Jean’s assistance puts the lie to that).
She has been bullied by the puritanical school girls at her college, and if not ostracized, certainly abandoned by her friends. She cannot confide in any adult and you fear for her life again when she meets the woman who will perform the abortion. An almost unrecognizable Anna Mouglalis plays Madame Rivière as a hardened executioner. She tells Anne that if she cries out or makes a row, she’ll stop the proceedings.
DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT THE ENDING SPOILED
As with Anne’s do-it-yourself attempt, Madame Rivière’s work is shot from over Anne’s shoulder. We here a spring-action speculum open and the sound of something being inserted into Anne that Rivière refers to as a wand. I don’t know if this is supposed to be a cannula but the idea is that Anne is to hold it inside her for 24 hours.
It does not work. Before she discovers this, she returns to her professor to ask if she can have the last few lectures to study before exams. He says she’s too far behind but she insists that she can catch up (and we have seen already that she is a capable student). He asks her if she’s been ill and she said that she has been sick with the illness that only women get; the one that turns them into housewives. It is here that she tells him she no longer wants to be an academic, but a writer. You can already sense what her first book will be about.
If she survives the second procedure. She returns to Rivière who warns her that a second procedure is frequently fatal and she does so at her own risk. Anne carries through with it and once back at college is in excruciating pain. Her classmate Olivia follows her to the bathroom where you hear the fetus fall out of her and for a brief moment glimpse the umbilicus against a dark red pool in the toilet. It is not gratuitous; it is necessary.
After the cord has been severed, we see Olivia carrying Anne back to Anne’s dorm room where she appears to be very close to expiring. Olivia screams for help and for a doctor and the lens goes fuzzy as Anne is wheeled out past her classmates as if on a gurney to hell. It genuinely feels like a descent even as the screen fades to white. We overhear a doctor and a nurse talking:
“What do I label it?”
“Miscarriage.”
July 5th appears on screen as Anne and the other students enter the classroom to take their exams.
There is no real way to get across how remarkable looking this film is. Laurent Tangy’s cinematography is a variegated symphony of sequences, ranging from the sunny days that seem to embody youthful dreams and hope to dark, shadow realms that remind us how nightmarish our lives can feel stripped of support, and hemmed in by seemingly insurmountable forces. The colors are intense and support the narrative with nuance and depth. Additionally, his depth of focus and sharpening of details echo Anne’s sense of dislocation and lack of definition until she takes a decisive line of action.
The walls and barriers to Anne’s future and for that matter, her present are thrown up repeatedly even as her classmates discuss Camus and Sartre(3), the two philosophers most identified with freedom and the absurdity of existence and whose influences were very much prevalent during the sixties. I was pleased that the discussions were neither sophomoric or pretentious but genuinely curious about how to relate to both writers. I think it was Anne who mentioned how uncertain she was about Sartre; his support of communism and Stalin in the fifties and his denial of the gulags was a major issue in his standing at the time.
Something that occurred to me throughout is how, in fact, Sartrean and Camusian Anne really is. Despite society’s roadblocks and barriers that you can almost feel, she exercises her freedom with eyes wide open (again, Vartolomei’s performance is riveting) and it is not a matter of rugged independence in the facile “cowboy up” ethic. She is embodying her freedom and creating her values through her very existence and through her struggle to simply be who she is. It is of dubious value to follow through on where Anne would stand on the Sartrean pour soi, but she seems to be living it as we follow her through the film with every decision she makes.
I also recognize that this story has its genesis, ultimately, in Annie Ernaux’s lived experience, thus we have another layer to consider. It might well be that Annie/Anne were both constructing their projects in the face of a systemic oppression that requires an enhanced sense of the oppressor as the fulfillment, frankly, of Sartrean bad faith. I sure as hell don’t want to force such an interpretation, but it might be worth considering how much of Anne’s actions may have been based on the prevalence of the political influence of the “existentialist Left” (“Leftist existentialist”? For the record, this is not pejorative).
In any case, one gets the sense that the academic environment in 1963 was setting the stage for the May 1969 student rebellions and I would argue would lead to the passing of the Veil Law in 1975. To Diwan and Romano’s credit, nothing is drawn in straight lines here. The only thing that matters is that Anne’s struggle was not unique.
Tragically, in the United States, her struggle may be again more relevant than ever.
Footnotes
- For more on the source material: https://www.yahoo.com/video/book-abortion-1960s-france-became-173450672.html
- Whitfield, Zoe. “Audrey Diwan on Happening, Her Illegal Abortion Drama Set In 1960s France”. AnOther. April 21, 2022. https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/14050/audrey-diwan-happening-illegal-abortion-drama.
- I wondered why Simone de Beauvoir wasn’t referenced and realized that it might well be because “The Second Sex” may have been too radical for a standard college campus that early on. Nevertheless, de Beauvoir’s writing did galvanize the women’s liberation movement at home and abroad.
Further/Additional Reading
Abortion in France:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12260084/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_France
While outside the film’s timeframe, the Manifesto of the 343 was hugely influential: https://time.com/5459995/manifesto-343-abortion-france/
For more background on the film and its relevance:
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