I haven’t read Annie Ernaux yet (2025 edit: i read ‘the years’ and it was an unbelievable text about personal and 20th-century-france history). I read that Les Années (2008) and Passion simple (1991) gained passionate readers in Turkey quickly after the translations. On a mundane Sunday morning, I was browsing through the films at Yorck, I saw this film adaptation was screening at noon, in a single séance, at Rollberg. The name Ernaux and the Best Film Award at Venice Film Festival excited me. With that, I also learned that Venice FF is the first film festival, started in 1932, as a part of the 18th Venice Biennale.
Audrey Diwan’s film tells the story of Anne Duchesne who studies literature in France, in the early 1960s. She’s a hardworking and promising student where all the students are highly stressed about passing the exams and not being able to explore their desires. The only relaxation moment they have is going to university parties, drinking coke, and dancing a bit. Living in a dormitory, Anne occasionally visits her parents who run a bar. The family conversations are also focused primarily on her success at school and earning her life.
Anne gets pregnant. Her carnal and arduous journey for finding a way to get abortion starts. Together with the fear and espousement of the law, no one helps her: her friends, her boyfriend, or the doctors. Anti-abortionist doctors even trick her with lies. Since it’s also unthinkable to tell her family too, she tries to find a way all by herself. The two films that this struggle quickly reminded me of are 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (2007) and Araf (2012), from Romania and Turkey. Lately, I have also encountered a lot of interference from the US regarding the oppression of anti-abortion laws, and the interrogations about miscarriages. The film feels like a story about the past for a second, then all of a sudden it becomes too actual.
I listed some quotes from the various reviews below. Things like the ‘buy yourself a novel’ scene, are really helpful reminders.
Shot exclusively in a 1.37 ratio
The film and its director refuse to censor: “The other grand subject of the film – one that is very important for me – is carnal pleasure.” said Diwan.
Happening revolves around the dichotomy of women’s pleasure and women’s pain.
Anne’s first attempt at self-inflicted abortion recalls Karin’s self-mutilation in Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972)
it is the first and only time blood is shown in the film. Indeed, the absence of blood throughout Happening is interesting to note and suits the film’s deterrence from exaggerated melodrama.
We are never allowed to forget this because the film is divided into the weeks leading up to her exams.
We are given through Anne’s story an empathetic understanding of how people solve “life’s problems” – we go about solving them by saying, as Anne says, “I solve them as best I can”.
a slice of clear-eyed French social realism that will be meaningful to anyone who cares about personal freedoms.
Annie sees another doctor (François Loriquet), who tricks her by prescribing a drug he says will induce her period but instead strengthens the embryo.
Shooting in the boxy Academy ratio, cinematographer Laurent Tangy sticks close to the protagonist throughout, searching for signs of surrender in her face even as her resolve never falters.
The film serves as both a transfixing drama and an urgent reminder of the need to protect women’s reproductive rights.
Winner at the Venice film festival, Audrey Diwan’s film captures the panic of an unwanted pregnancy before the legalisation of abortion in provincial France
Her hardworking mum and dad, Gabrielle and Jacques (played by Sandrine Bonnaire and Eric Verdin) run a bar, and Gabrielle is endlessly proud of her daughter, at one stage giving her some money and saying: “Buy yourself a novel!”
Diwan’s movie is cleverly structured so that we do not at first know who the father is… . The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe.
Happening takes a different line on abortion than a film like, say, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake from 2004 or Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days from 2007, films that focused with a more ironised chill on the abortionist; this is about the pregnant woman herself.
Trying to vomit in secret, to shower in communal bathrooms without anyone noticing the mounding belly, stealing food from other girls’ lunchboxes and looking – constantly looking – for someone to tell, someone who would tell someone else who might know something, without being branded a slut.
