Hearing about a new film adaptation of an Annie Ernaux book always makes me nervous. Her texts are so committed to the act of writing itself, what only writing can reveal, that to translate them into images carries risks of misfire. Pairing intimate, personal details with devices from more sociological or anthropological traditions (lists, observations, cataloguing, collation), her work presents sizeable challenges to adaptation. In the case of L’événement (literally, ‘The Event’, translated as Happening for both book and film versions), the text Ernaux wrote in 2000 about the illegal abortion she had as a student in France in the sixties, the imperative is not so much to “tell the story” of an unwanted pregnancy as to, years later, achieve neutral distance from it via the deliberate and retrospective process of prose composition. It is about saying – to make use of the English title – that yes, this happened, but that the flow of reflections and sense-memories inspired by its writing might in the end be more interesting than the procedure itself.
Consequently, I had reservations about the French-Lebanese director Audrey Diwan’s take on L’événement, which won the Alice Guy prize in France this month and the Golden Lion at Venice last year. The film has largely been presented in the press as an “abortion film” or, more dubiously, as an “abortion drama”. It is a relief, then, that Diwan’s Happening avoids, for the most part, a sensationalist or spectacular approach. Instead it offers an even and clear-sighted portrait of twenty-something Anne Duchene (Anamaria Vartolomei), a literature student in sixties France, determined – despite abortion’s illegal status – not to bring her foetus to term. For the most part, the film’s measured tone hews close to the intention stated by Ernaux in the original text, to “guard against lyrical outbursts such as anger or pain”,[1] and to insist on her experience as a symptom of collective suffering, shared in by “hundreds of other women”.[2]
Ernaux’s book is occasionally governed by a duty-bound tone, or the belief that if she fails to commit this singular “event” to writing she will become “guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by the patriarchy”.[3] Diwan’s film largely follows suit, though is in some ways warier than Ernaux of the illusions of affirmative ‘sorority’. Sisterhood is rarely a source of comfort in her Happening. Though the film opens with a tender portrait of homosocial intimacy – Anne and friends getting ready for a party, smoking and zipping up each other’s dresses – this image of support between women is soon shattered. “Those girls love you,” slurs a fireman chatting Anne up at the bar in the following scene, to which she replies, “They’re spying on me… It suits them to think I’m a slut.” Throughout Happening, the tightness of Diwan’s profilmic perspective, which adheres so close to Anne the audience can often hear her ragged breathing, conveys the hothouse, claustrophobic milieu of an educational environment in which one is surveilled by their peers.
Anne’s solitude is palpable. Though the scenes between Anne and her mother (an unflappable Sandrine Bonnaire) are tenderly composed, they principally work to establish Anne’s alienation. (It is implied that she chooses not to tell her mother she is pregnant out of fear that the latter, having worked so hard to enable her daughter’s education, will disown her.) After having been tricked by a male doctor into taking a hormone which she thinks will expel the foetus but which in fact only strengthens it, Anne pleads with her friendship group to help her find some “assistance”, but the blonde ringleader of the group cuts her off with a curt, “It’s not our problem.”
In such a context, Anne’s attempt to obtain a termination against all odds – which, it is suggested, if not secured, will compromise her already insecure place at university – takes on the status of a quest, as Diwan displaces a typically male “hero’s journey” onto a parade of waiting rooms and hospitals and dingy bathrooms where Anne scans her underwear for the relief of a red stain. She is finally led to a clandestine abortionist by a philandering male student who introduces her to a girl who has already risked the operation. Meeting at night on campus, the latter gives Anne the woman’s number and address – a shadowy departure from the film’s otherwise conspicuously sunny, luminous cinematography. The scrupulously clean and tidy clinic of the abortionist (in French, a faiseuse d’ange, an “angel maker”, played by Anna Mouglalis), further subverts presumed links between illegal abortion and seedy squalor and returns Happening to its distinctly bright visuals.
Consistent with Diwan’s stated intention to film from Anne’s perspective and therefore avoid objectifying her through an exploitative directorial gaze, during the intensely visceral abortion sequence the camera is positioned behind Anne’s head, as if we are lying horizontal on the makeshift operating table with her.[3] With the focus strictly on the abortionist’s labour rather than Anne’s face, the audience is crucially disqualified from the explicit sight of the latter’s pain, invited to imagine it by sound and feel alone. The decision not to directly film Anne’s agony – which, in its avoidance of a head-on shot, reminded me of Céline Sciamma’s lateral focus on a toddler crawling on the bed as an abortion is taking place in Portrait of a Lady on Fire – allows Diwan to preserve some respect for her protagonist, or to, in the director’s own words, avoid “turning duration into provocation.”[4]
It feels disappointing therefore that at the moment of miscarriage itself, Happening yields to sensationalism in a manner inconsistent with its previous restraint. As the audience, and her formerly bitchy classmate, Olivia, witness Anne staggering to the toilet in the dorm’s communal bathroom into which her body expels the foetus, the sound of flesh as it thuds down into the porcelain bowl is worthy of a fierce dramatic climax in and of itself. (In the cinema where I watched the film, there were audible gasps). But Diwan’s subsequent decision to slowly pan the camera down, to graphically display the bloodied, hanging mass, still attached to the placenta inside Anne, registered to me as de trop, gratuitous. In an interview with France Culture, the director said she felt obliged to “confront the spectator with a visceral image” yet I questioned where such an obligation to confront had been sourced.[5]
When Anne pleads with her classmate to sever the umbilical cord, the bathroom tableau opens out beyond an individual predicament to become one of interlinked responsibility. At the same time, Olivia’s chance involvement, having stumbled in unwittingly to this macabre scene, avoids too literal a portrait of a feminist ‘ally’ riding in on a white horse. The dilemma of who will be the one to cut the cord maps onto Diwan’s quandary more broadly in regards to Happening’s ethics of duration. When exactly should one cut this scene? How to usher the spectator into a profound space of reckoning without such sustained looking becoming avaricious? With regards to the specific treatment of abortion, how to ground a culturally under-represented issue in concrete characters and contexts (thus de-exoticising the procedure) without, at the same time, going too far into spectacle, voyeurism, and petty drama?
Diwan does not stop there. When Olivia leads Anne back to her bed, the latter begins haemorrhaging blood, and the camera tracks down the full length of her body to show the audience the blood pooling on the sheets. The loss is sizeable enough to warrant Anne’s admission into hospital, a fate the girl who gave her the abortionist’s number cautioned she avoid at all costs: “If you’re unlucky the doctor will scrawl ‘Abortion’ on your forms and you’ll go to prison.” The tension scales another peak in the next scene when we see a doctor and a nurse looming over Anne’s bed in the ward. “What should I write down?” the latter asks the male clinician. “Miscarriage,” he replies.
Happening could have ended with this scene, with the audience’s deep exhale that Anne will not be criminalised for her choice. Yet, heavily invested in her main character’s future destiny as a famous writer, as “Annie Ernaux”, Diwan refuses to afford a white male doctor the pivotal ‘last word’ in signing off Anne’s fate. The film is unequivocal in its presentation of the protagonist herself as the final author of her destiny. Its final scene takes place in a university lecture hall where Anne, back after her ordeal, is sitting her exams on a sunny summer morning. “Students, take your pens!” the literature professor shouts. By ending on another key event within Anne’s life, Diwan avoids making her abortion the only story.
The film’s final emphasis on self-determination and the potency of acts of will in shaping one’s own life – as Simone de Beauvoir, a key influence on Ernaux’s corpus, so indelibly impressed in the era’s cornerstone feminist text, The Second Sex – avoids leaving Anne as a tragic victim. Yet in the end Happening feels maybe a little too triumphant, too retrospectively determined by Ernaux’s later glittering career as a Legendary Author – the arc of which most French audiences would know. Happening succeeds in not being a one-trick “abortion drama”, but its determination to evade cliché means that other things get lost. Diwan’s tightness of perspective affirms individual agency over collective solidarity. In the book, Ernaux praises an anonymous fellow student lending her the money for the termination as “the first in a series of women who lent me their support, guides whose knowledge, practical experience and wise decisions helped me to overcome this ordeal as best I could”, but in the film, these offers are batted away.[6] Anne relies only on herself. Ernaux’s cited “hundreds of other women” are, in Happening the film, still yet to be born.
Alice Blackhurst is a writer and scholar based in Oxford.
[1] Annie Ernaux, trans. Tanya Leslie, Happening (London : Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019), p. 58.
[2] Annie Ernaux, Happening, p.37.
[3] Ibid.
[4] ‘Annie Ernaux et Audrey Diwan font l’événement,’ France Culture, 23 November 2021, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa7LPDoV6RA>
[5] Ibid.
[6] Annie Ernaux et Audrey Diwan font l’événement,’ France Culture.
[7] Annie Ernaux, Happening, p.43 (emphasis Ernaux’s own).