An abortion story, an existential drama
Rated R. 100 minutes. In theaters.
Her body, her choice, her life. That’s the unambiguous refrain that runs through “Happening,” a powerful French drama about a woman seeking an abortion. Set in the early 1960s, when the procedure was criminalized in
France, it arrives in the United States at a fraught moment, with the Supreme Court seemingly poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. When I first saw the movie, it felt like a warning shot from a still-distant land. Now it feels urgently of the moment.
The world seems lush with possibilities for Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei, restrained and deeply empathetic), a 23-year-old student attending school in the southwest. There, she lives in a women’s dorm, hangs out with friends and sometimes goes with them to a bar, where she drinks and flirts and bobs to the rock ’n’ roll. Sometimes, she visits her reserved but loving parents (Sandrine Bonnaire plays her mother), who own a bistro, a welcoming space that she inhabits freely, whether she’s chatting with customers or studying in the back. But Anne’s horizons extend beyond her family’s. She wants to continue her studies. She wants to write.
Director Audrey Diwan quickly makes you want the same for Anne by inviting you into a life that has just begun to bloom. With visual intimacy, calm rhythms and a sensitive touch, Diwan traces its textures and rituals, drops in on lectures and catches the intellectual hum. By day, Anne and her friends casually discuss Camus and Sartre. Later, though, when their talk turns to sex, these young, capable women stammer and even panic, and the palpable heat that they have stirred up — simply by being young and alive — condenses into an oppressive fog. It might help if they were reading Beauvoir, but she’s not on the curriculum.
Based on the short, impressionistic memoir by the same title from celebrated French writer Anne Ernaux, “Happening” recounts what it was like to be a young woman whose life changed — and world ominously narrowed — in 1963 with an unwanted pregnancy. In her book (published in 2000), Ernaux shifts between the past and the present, often commenting on what she did and felt decades earlier.
Her approach underscores the memoir’s tension between its two time periods and its distinctly drawn subjects, but also puts the past at an emotional remove: The young Annie struggles under the coolly intellectual, contemplative gaze of her older self.
Diwan’s sympathies are evident from the start (the camera hovers near Anne like a caring, at times anxious friend), and so are her smart choices. She has ditched the older Ernaux’s comments to focus exclusively on the younger woman’s desperate efforts to secure an abortion, which intensifies the drama and shakes off its dust. The movie has the usual early 1960s trappings that you expect in period stories, with its knee-brushing skirts and twangy guitars. Yet because Diwan doesn’t embalm the story in history (or with fetishistic production and costume designs), she has also closed the distance between the past and the present.
The story unfolds piecemeal. Anne is newly pregnant shortly after the film opens, and is soon checking her panties for signs of her period. “Still nothing,” she writes in her calendar, adding an exclamation mark. The days slip by. She talks to an acquaintance who works at a factory (a flash of an alternate reality), practices conjugating Latin verbs (“to act”) and visits a solicitous doctor (Fabrizio Rongione in a brief, vivid turn). When he asks if she has had sex, Anne lies — “no” — right before he says that she is pregnant. “Do something,” she demands. “The law is unsparing,” he replies.
As five weeks turn into seven and Anne’s belly swells, “Happening” becomes an existential thriller. Her situation becomes worrying, then excruciating. There’s nowhere for Anne to go for help and no one to turn to, or so it seems to her, creating a sense of mounting isolation that Diwan’s intimate filmmaking only underscores. Anne’s friends are terrified of getting pregnant (“it’d be the end of the world”); she can’t talk to her parents; her doctors are afraid or hostile. The confidence in the state — in the soundness of its institutions and systems — that’s an article of faith in many contemporary French movies is notably, harrowingly, absent.
One surprise of “Happening” is that the world it portrays, with its moralistic whispers and prohibitions, bears no relationship to the popular image of French sexuality, specifically that of the nubile Frenchwoman, which once set tongues and fingers wagging. In 1957, New
York Times film critic Bosley Crowther (in an article headlined “Probing Foreign Films”) huffed that “the startlingly shaped” Brigitte Bardot had “become France’s undisputed champion in the international sexpot race.” Two years later in a very different consideration of Bardot, Beauvoir noted that the star was more popular in the United States than at home: “In France, there is still a great deal of emphasis, officially, on women’s dependence upon men.”