33rd Alliance Française French Film Festival 2022 and The Current Cinema - Janice Tong's 🎥 5th Filmic Postcard - L’ÉVENÉMENT/HAPPENING (Audrey Diwan, 2021)

Anamaria Vartolomei as Annie, a young woman
in the midst of navigating what life has to offer (or take away)

Based on an autobiographical novel of the same name by Annie Ernaux, Happening won the Golden Lion at 2021 Venice Film Festival last year.  There are good reasons for this accolade, given the rare glimpse of quiet talent in a field saturated by stars, and Audrey Diwan’s sensitive but purposeful handling of its subject matter. Ernaux was in her 60s when she wrote the novel which was published in 2003. 

 

There is something quite modest about this film, and straight forward too. I recall reading an interview with Ernaux who said that she tried very hard to keep emotions and sentimentality out of the text; and as she had been a co-writer of the script (alongside  Diwan and seasoned screenwriter Marcia Romano); that same feeling of exactitude and lyrical storytelling permeates the film.

 

Some critics have picked up on the restrained performance, (or, sometimes unkindly, the “lack of emotions”) shown by the lead character; but one should note that this is by design. The impulse of the story was not meant to be sentimental; nor was it about learning from hindsight. It was, very simply, a story that needed to be told; and its subject matter to be given the airtime it deserves. There is a lot of stigma that still surrounds teenage pregnancy and abortion, despite current societal tolerances, compared to the very different era of 1963 when Ernaux was just a young student in France. 

 

The sharp-minded Annie

Happening is a prismatically intimate film, rendered with beautiful close-ups – of the girls, of experiences and secrets shared; of boarding school environments and the relative freedoms away from home that young adults have to navigate through. But at the same time, the film casts a darker glimpse of the dictates of society – that certain decisions were only available to be made by men. And whilst the film deals with an important subject – that of pro-choice – by telling it as a first-hand experience and through the perspective of a strong-willed young woman, Annie Duchesne (portrayed with astonishing sensitivity by Anamaria Vartolomei) – it throws wide open the questions around ideas of freedom. It asks of us to think deeply about the kind of freedom women can and should have over their own bodies. 

 

Anna Mouglalis as Mme Rivière

Abortion didn’t become legal in France until January 18, 1975; prior to that, you would go to jail for aiding or being found complicit with a woman who seeks this kind of help. The subject of abortion was so taboo in the 1960s that when Annie found out she was pregnant, there was hardly anyone she was able to turn to. Certainly not to her parents or even her closest friends; instead, she went to a doctor who feigned his assistance. Her grades at school plummeted, and her tutor found her disconnection with her studies to be unacceptable. Even her best friends became indifferent to her situation and distanced themselves. She had to fend for herself, almost the whole way. Until she meets an auxiliary nurse by the name of Mme Rivière (played by Anna Mouglalis who I last saw in Philippe Garrel’s Jealousy (2013) against Louis Garrel); introduced to her by a friend of a friend, Laëtitia, (Alice de Lencquesaing makes a guest appearance). I loved the way Mouglalis transformed her voice to play Mme Rivière; deep and raspy, it had the kind of gravitas required for the type of duty she was to carry out, and somehow, you trusted her; her calm, her knowledge, her rules. 

 

Sandrine Bonnaire as Annie’s mother was also superb, as was Luàna Bajrami, who plays Hélène, one of Annie’s closest friends. Bajrami is another actor to watch, having been seen in the very extraordinary School's Out (2018), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and Happy Birthday (2019), Bajarmi has been busy, chalking up 10 feature films over the course of the last four years, not to mention TV series as well as shorts. You cannot help but be drawn to Vartolomei throughout the filmand Laurent Tangy’s cinematography really does her performance justice; her body is a cipher that must be decoded on the big screen; every movement, every sidelong glance and direct look tell us of the immensity of her burden and her strength of will to overcome it. 

Writer Anne Ernaux (photographed in 2021)

 

Having read Ernaux’s book Simple Passion yesterday, where she refers back to this incident (having made a visit back to the scene of her “clandestine abortion”) in one of the later fragments; her voice, her tone and even her passionate nature is very close to me. Very simply, I hearher. And in this film, you too, can hear and feel Annie; she saturatesthe screen. There is something quite familiar in Ernaux’s writing; just like Duras or Cixous; there is a calling out into the future, searing time as their voices blaze through acontemporaneously. In Ernaux’s books, passion and its rendering within the text is at once stoic and palpable; it leaves you feeling more brave and with enormous respect for her having been successful in her convictions, and ultimately, her act; else there would not have been the writer, Ernaux; instead, she would have been succumbed to “the illness that only strikes women and turns them into housewives” – as her younger self told her literature professor in the film.

 

The Alliance Française French Film Festival has closed its season in Australia. With sincere thanks for making these glorious films available on the big screen every year.

HAPPENING is now screening at Palace Cinemas in Sydney.