Happening
L'événement

Of the many timely films about the subject of abortion released in America in the year in which the Supreme Court overturned Row vs Wade, the French period drama Happening resonates the most. This is not because it's the most harrowing depiction of the subject, nor the most subtle, nor the most innovative—the film is far too matter-of-fact to qualify as any of those. It is the decidedly unextraordinary milieu and observational storytelling style that makes this such an effective picture. Set in France in 1963, when abortion was illegal in the country, Audrey Diwan's adaptation of Annie Ernaux's 2000 novel centres on a promising university student named Anne who becomes pregnant and doesn't want to interrupt her studies or career path to become a mother. Unsure of what to do and bereft of seemingly any help or advice, Anne resolves not to have the child, even if she must risk ridicule, shame, prison, and even her health and safety.

I haven't read Ernaux's 2000 short novel, but I know it is one of many autobiographical works the Nobel Prize-winning author is known for. Yet Diwan's film feels full of the kind of observational detail about its protagonists that's often absent or self-aware in memoirs. The performance by French-Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne is one of the year's most captivating. The film eschews the visceral immediacy of some of the most powerful, and more memorably titled, movies about abortion—Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020). While those pictures take place in different eras in different countries with different abortion laws, their minimalist aesthetic and time-compressed duration (one and two days respectively) provide them both with a level of contained tension. Happening is not a film that's narratively concerned with a direct route to obtaining an abortion. It plays far more like a specific character study with political themes and historical circumstances used as a setting for a story that unfolds over many months.

The film clearly illustrates how making abortion illegal doesn't lead to fewer abortions but to significantly less safe abortions. But the picture never feels the least bit didactic or performative. The details in Vartolomei's performance and in Diwan's direction give us far more insight into the protagonist than films that try to place us directly into the main character's situation and make us wonder what we might do. We get a robust and intimate sense of this specific young woman, her desires (sexual, intellectual, and life desires) as well as the things that oppose those aspirations. She views her situation as a disease (a disease that only affects women) and all options she faces look like life sentences (again, ones that only applied to women). As concern about her situation grows along with her swelling belly, Anne's academic status and pursuits start to slip. We see how her situation seems hopeless—not only her attempts to obtain an illegal procedure but just her attempt to obtain any guidance around her all-too-common situation.

Part of what makes Vartolomei's performance so riveting is that the screenplay by Diwan and co-writers Marcia Romano and Anne Berest, doesn't fully develop the other characters who surround Anne. While terrific, naturalistic actors populate the picture, they are more playing reactions than dimensional developed characters. An exception to this is the character of Anne's classmate Jean, played by Kacey Mottet Klein. When he learns of her pregnancy, he sees it only in terms of how it can advantage him—they can have sex without fear of consequences. But over the movie's progression, he ends up as Anne's strongest ally, putting himself at great risk to help her. In a way, Jean is the character to whom Diwan gives a narrative arc, while Anne's goals and desires remain steadfast. Anne is not a character in an abortion drama who spends much time weighing her choice's moral, spiritual, or political implications. There is no reason for her to. She knows what she wants and what she does not want. Whereas Jean is asked to put himself in her position and view things from her perspective. This makes him an unusual, but ideal audience surrogate—not only for male viewers but for anyone who looks at this issue outside of the perspective of an individual woman's choice.

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