Young woman’s story turns out to be timely
‘Happening,’ a movie about illegal abortion in ’60s France, eerily relevant to U.S. today
When French filmmaker Audrey Diwan brought her movie “Happening” to the San Francisco International Film Festival in April, it was just a couple of weeks before news broke that the U.S. Supreme Court looks poised, based on a leaked draft opinion, to reverse its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal in all 50 states.
Yet Diwan’s riveting film, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and was released in France to widespread acclaim in the fall, was already focusing early audiences’ attention on the very real dangers posed to women if courts take steps to roll back female reproductive rights.
“Happening,” based on Annie Ernaux’s unsparing 2000 memoir, portrays just such a time, when abortion and even contraception were still illegal in France, before that country’s passage of “la loi
Veil,” the 1975 French law decriminalizing abortion.
The film provides a close-up look at one young woman’s desperate efforts to terminate an unwanted pregnancy without recourse to legal methods.
“It’s ’63 in my movie, but unfortunately it’s the same narrative” playing out now, Diwan said during a recent interview with The Chronicle at her Union Square hotel. “I never thought while doing the movie that it would be so accurate in the United States.”
Diwan and the movie’s magnetic lead, French-Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei, were headed later the same afternoon to speak with a feminist student group at the University of San Francisco. They were both eager to hear what young people close in age to their film’s protagonist had to say about “Happening” and what they both called a “culture of silence” around abortion that unfortunately wasn’t extinguished with its legalization.
Vartolomei plays Anne, a 23-yearold student and aspiring writer at a Normandy university who has great academic promise. Her shock early in the film at finding out she is pregnant from a fling with an out-of-town guy threatens to upend her entire future.
Shot with intimate, almost claustrophobic focus on Anne’s inner turmoil, and the way she feels trapped inside her own changing body, the film accentuates the ticking clock anxiety that accompanies her waiting, and wishing, every week that she would start bleeding. She tries inducing it on her own — with medicine, injections and worse — and attempts without success to find a doctor willing to help.
The taboo against abortion, or even abetting a woman in need, means Anne is completely alone with her secret in a culture of profound silence, unable to tell her friends or even her working-class mother (played by French star Sandrine Bonnaire).
Diwan points out that the movie’s subject matter was timely long before this critical moment for American women. But it arrives in U.S. theaters this week with an unforeseen sense of urgency and uncanny timing, making “Happening,” a small European film, perfectly poised to spark conversation about one of the most controversial issues facing the nation today.
That’s exactly what Diwan hoped for in making it.
“I never intended to make a film telling people what to think, but I really want to open discussion,” she said. “I know we don’t all agree on the idea that abortion should be legal, but if you are against it, I think you should have to face what an illegal and unsafe abortion journey really is. I made the movie in order to open debate.
“If you say to women, ‘You are not allowed an abortion,’ then they will still find a way. And they can severely injure themselves. Are we willing to accept (as a society) that level of pain?” she continued. “When people are against safe, legal abortion, I don’t know if they’ve thought enough about what really happens next. If a young woman like Anne doesn’t have access to a legal procedure, what happens to her body and to her mind?”
Vartolomei, who is the same age as her character, Anne, recalled Diwan telling her before they started filming: “Anne is a soldier.” When the production was delayed by the COVID-19 lockdown, they spent a lot of time discussing inspirations, such as the 1999 Dardennes brothers’ film “Rosetta,” for her resolute body language, her steely resolve and direct gaze.
“My character feels something pushing her ahead. She has so much determination,” Vartolomei said.
Unlike many abortion movies that focus on a character’s decisionmaking, “Happening” is clear from the outset that Anne wants to put off motherhood in order to fulfill her more pressing goals: to pass her exams and establish her career. “I’d like a child one day, but not instead of a life,” she tells a doctor.
“She never doubts that this is what she wants, what she needs,” said Vartolomei.
Diwan collaborated with Ernaux, who is now 81, when developing her screenplay. She says the older writer’s diaristic, unflinching book “felt like an intimate thriller. It helped me think about the issue after I got an abortion myself. She would have never been a writer probably if she had not found a way. So if her book exists, and if my movie exists, it’s because …”
Vartolomei chimed in: “Because she made a choice.”