Happening (2021) - The powerful testimony of a girl alone

Credit: allocine.fr

In the middle of the night, a teenage girl hungrily scavenges through the contents of a communal fridge. She eats on the floor with her hands, writhes around in bed, painfully clawing at the skin of her stomach. Strangely there is something of Julia Ducournau’s Raw (in French, Grave) present in Audrey Diwan’s Happening (L’Evénement), a sense of panic, of compulsion, of urgency. Except Anne isn’t a teen discovering her taste for flesh, like Ducournau’s heroine Justine. Anne is pregnant. Her midnight feasts aren’t cannibalistic impulsions, but a desperate attempt to find something that doesn’t make her nauseous. Her bedtime terrors are not a skin rash, but the effects of the foetus growing inside of her. It is possible that the two resemble each other, in feeling, or in cinematography. What differentiates them however is that Happening is real, topical, personal. And that’s what makes it even more horrific.

Based on Annie Ernaux’s novel of the same name, Diwan’s discreet yet thunderous drama tells the story of Anne (an exceptional performance from Anamaria Vartolomei) – modelled on Ernaux herself –  who realises she is pregnant in the midst of her studies. The result of a brief fling, Anne is certain she does not want to have a baby, determined to pass her exams and begin her career as a writer.  Yet, it is 1963 and both contraception and abortion are illegal. No doctor wants to help her, and Anne receives no support from her friends, who fear prison time if they support or assist her endeavours to rid herself of ‘it’. At a loss, carrying a very dangerous secret, Anne decides to take matters into her own hands.

Credit: allocine.fr

Vartolomei exquisitely captures both a seething determination to prevail, a resolution to defy what is expected of her, and a quiet panic that day in day out torments her into believing that this might well be how her life turns out, overrun by “the illness that turns women into housewives”, as she tells a dumbstruck professor.

What is particularly extraordinary about Happening is its never-faltering courage to tell the story as it is. Abortion is an increasingly back-and-forth topical issue, balancing between countries that have recently legalised it (such as Argentina), and those that have started banning it (Poland). Diwan’s film takes place in 1963, a time at which Anne’s honesty with doctors and friends, who pale and try to terminate the conversation immediately, is taboo and nightmarish to watch. And yet, whilst it appears far away on screen, it isn’t so far from the present truth. A woman’s body is still not hers. Anne’s torment, from being perceived as a walking, living crime to enduring the terror of pregnancy alone, is determined for her by aged doctors, who lie to her about medication and refuse to discuss even the possibility of another option with her. No doubt Diwan’s decision to film everything however, at its most graphic and traumatic, is what makes Happening such a powerful testimony of abortion. Perhaps watching and squirming at the very real turmoil thousands of women who have had to illegally abort have been through won’t change current laws. But as Anne fights, fails, fights again, for her life, her future, her body, Happening superbly shouts its message, rallying viewers into battling alongside her.