The French have never been wont to sugar-coat anything. And why would they bother to do so with abortion? Or, at least, why would writer-director Audrey Diwan? In adapting Annie Ernaux’s L’événement, released in 2000, with co-writers Marcia Romano and Anne Berest, Diwan refuses to shy away from a subject that remains as relevant today as it ever was. And yes, a better title in English would have been The Event in lieu of Happening, but such is the epitome of a word getting “lost in translation.” In either case, both titles seek to ironically downplay the nature of what is, well, happening.
Determined to do the opposite of what most filmmakers decide to do in depicting the 1960s, Diwan shows no signs of wistful nostalgia in her portrayal of one of the most brutal decades for women (this, too, was a key aspect of Edgar Wright’s recent film, Last Night in Soho). Because, obviously, pretty much every decade was especially brutal for said gender up until the early 70s, when more legal rights stipulating equality were passed (thanks RBG) and, with said “equality,” a woman’s ability to make decisions pertaining her own body were “allowed.”
In the U.S., abortion was not made legal until 1973 via Roe vs. Wade. In France, it became legal in 1975. Unfortunately for Anne Duchesne (Anamaria Vartolomei), she’s experiencing the hell of her pregnancy in 1963. Worse still, in a part of France that isn’t Paris, therefore at least slightly more open-minded to the notion of “getting rid of it.”
Hailing from the small southwestern town of Angoulême (now known as “the place where The French Dispatch was filmed”), Anne is the first in her family to ever have a chance at attending university, providing she can pass her exams to do so. For this and many other reasons, her two “best friends,” Brigitte (Louise Orry-Diquero) and Hélène (Luàna Bajrami), look up to her. She’s the obvious leader of their “pack.” Even when they go to a local bar where dancing and drinking take place (just Coke for Anne, mind you), she feels the pressure of being constantly watched, “looked to” for something. Nonetheless, she notes to one of the local pompiers (firemen) trying to hit on her, “It suits them to think I’m a slut.” Indeed, it suits pretty much everyone to think that of women, including those who still feel the “need” to legislate anti-abortion laws that reinforce the patriarchal idea that a female should be saddled with the “whorish” choices she makes. Even when men are the ones who so often tempt them down that path, knowing full-well they’ll never have to bear any of the consequences if they don’t want to. Such is the case with the little rich asshole Anne decides to have sex with.
When she tells Maxime (Julien Frison), a political science student (again, irony), about her “mishap” over the phone, his concern seems palpable, but only for himself. What’s more, the question is never what will he do about it, but what will she do? Sensing his uselessness (as is generally the case with most men), she assures him she’ll figure it out. But everywhere she turns is nothing but a shut door, an insistence that she has “no choice” and that she must “accept her fate.” It’s all utterly disgusting, made even more so by the fact that all of this is going on right now in states like Texas, Arkansas and, freshly, Oklahoma, where, of late, a higher number of provisional and restrictive anti-abortion laws have been passed. Ones that even the Supreme Court has chosen to uphold. How very 1963 in France indeed.
As Anne’s grim fate starts to dawn on her, she realizes she can’t even broach the subject with her closest friends, with Brigitte chastising her that she shouldn’t joke about being pregnant. The implication being not only that it would be impossible for her to get an abortion, but that she shouldn’t have any evidence of such carnal lust in her mental wheelhouse, let alone display bodily proof of it. For another key aspect of Happening is that everyone of the era—especially women—is expected to pretend they don’t experience erotic lust of any kind. That they’re all quite “proper”—a term, in this time period, synonymous with being sexless.
Which is also why Anne lies to her doctor, Docteur Ravinsky (Fabrizio Rongione), and insists she’s never had sex. Of course, he counters with the foolproof evidence to the contrary that she’s pregnant. Although mildly sympathetic to her situation, he insists that he absolutely cannot “help” her. Thus, she tries another doctor who, at first, seems hesitant to oblige her request for terminating the pregnancy, but then gives her a slip of paper with information on the name of an injection that will supposedly induce menstruation. To her horror, particularly after going through the trouble of sticking a piping hot lance up her crotch to give herself what Juno McGuff might call a “hasty abortion,” she realizes too late that the paternalistic, misogynistic bastard has actually only prescribed her an embryo strengthener.
What’s most noticeable as a result of scenes like the vagina-stabbing one is the attention to sound editing. All we can hear is her strained, pained breathing. Yet she never lets out a bona fide shriek—another poetic testament to being constantly silenced and forced to stay silent throughout her entire ordeal (a word that feels all too inadequate to describe what she, and so many women like her, must go through). This technique, too, avoids the potential for Happening to take an overly melodramatic turn, veering steadfastly away from the “Lifetime movie” category and frankly depicting a woman’s private suspense thriller as the weeks tick by in demarcated title cards to show the viewer that Anne’s future is slipping away as rapidly as her fetus is growing. And, to the point of bringing up Juno above, the French, unlike the Americans, aren’t going to 1) try to make abortion “palatable” through sardonic comedy and 2) aren’t going to, once again, come at us with the tired abortion movie trope of the woman in question suddenly deciding she actually wants to keep it.
With Diwan herself having gotten an abortion, the film is personal and unsparing in its portrayal. Diwan also noted that it would be in the better interest of Happening’s cause for those who were anti-abortion to actually see it in order to more clearly understand not only the isolation and ostracism illegal abortion causes for women, but the extreme danger to their health. Because, in the end, a woman who wants to abort will always find a way to do so.
Just as Anne does through the underground railroad, of sorts, that leads her to Laëtitia (Alice de Lencquesaing), introduced to her by a “friend” named Jean (Kacey Mottet Klein). A university acquaintance who feigns wanting to help Anne before trying to get her out of her clothes, assuring she shouldn’t worry now—you can’t get pregnant once you’re pregnant. Because yeah, men are fucking cochons. But, at the very least, he does bring her to Laëtitia, who, in turn, gives her the inside information on how to access Madame Rivière (Anna Mouglalis). To date, there’s probably never been a more memorable back alley abortionist rendered to the screen.
And while everyone else has remained doggedly unaware of why Anne seems to suddenly be so “off,” so cavalier about her future (knowing she won’t have one if this baby comes out), including her mother, Gabrielle (Sandrine Bonnaire), and Professeur Bornec (Pio Marmaï), who took a shine to her as his best student of literature, it takes Madame Rivière a matter of seconds to determine that Anne is twelve weeks pregnant. Chalk it up to her “experience,” or perhaps the fact that she is the only one in the region willing to acknowledge reality. One that entails, resultantly, listening to a pregnant woman and what she wants to do with, oh, her own body.
This is why, even when Madame Rivière warns Anne of the likelihood of her all but guaranteed physical endangerment if she performs a second “pass” on the fetus (that just won’t seem to die), when Anne says that’s what she wants, Madame Rivière agrees to do it. Just as, one would imagine, many other back alley abortionists are about to as we step further into the past with these increasing new laws designed to put alienating regulations on what a woman can and can’t do with herself. Not only that, but laws that criminalize other people for trying to help when the government—which was theoretically designed to do just that for those it governs—will not. Instead only harming women in particular.
