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In Audrey dIwAn’s tense And
quietly radical film Happening, Anne,
a bright young student in early 1960s
France, discovers she’s pregnant. The
law, as the doctor who breaks the news
tells her, “is unsparing.” Anyone who
helps her terminate the pregnancy
will land in jail, as will she. Her clos-
est friends abandon her when she
confesses her plight; the father of the
unborn child absolves himself of re-
sponsibility. A doctor who feigns sym-
pathy pretends to help her, though
in reality he’s trying to seal her fate.
And when she begs a male teacher
to help her catch up on the lectures
she’s missed, he asks bluntly what has
caused her absence. “The illness that
strikes only women,” she says, “and
turns them into housewives.”
Happening—which won the top
prize, the Golden Lion, at last year’s
Venice Film Festival—is a difficult
film to watch. That’s in part because of
an agonizing, if discreetly shot, scene
in which the heroine—played with
raw, bruised resolution by Anamaria
Vartolomei—attempts a DIY abortion
with a knitting needle. (When I saw
the film in Venice, several audience
members left the theater during this
scene, though among those filing out,
I counted not a single woman.)
But Diwan’s film is less harrowing
for its depictions of physical suffering
than for its forthright exploration of
Anne’s emotional desolation. She’s a
country girl whose dream is to become
a professor. But women who have
sex before marriage are written off as
“fast”; their sexual desire is treated as
a flaw, a cause for shame.
Happening is adapted from the
2000 book by the French writer Annie
Ernaux, detailing the experience of
her own abortion in 1963. It’s an un-
yielding picture in some ways; you
might long for a sliver of optimism
tucked amid its layers of grim truth.
But then, all its hope lies in Anne’s
face, as uncompromising as an early
crocus. This is the face of a woman
who deserves much more respect—
for her body, for her very life—than
her society affords her. And if 1960s
France seems like a faraway time and
place, Happening comes entwined
with a warning: the country it’s show-
ing us could very likely be the United
States of Tomorrow. —s.z.
MOVIES
MOVIES
A grim but timely warning
from 1960s France
Sandrine Bonnaire and Anamaria Vartolomei: second-class citizens in 1960s France
