Picturehouse Blog

"I believe that any experience, whatever its stature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth," writes Annie Ernaux in Happening, the book. She recalls being twenty-three, a promising literature student and pregnant. Happening is the recollection not of how she got pregnant, but of how she got an abortion at a time when it wasn't a debate, nor a woman's choice, but completely criminalised. 

Early in Happening, the film, Anne – played by Anamaria Vartolomei – goes to several doctors trying to procure an abortion, or at the very least information on how to. The second doctor she visits she finds in the phonebook (an antiquated notion now, but this is set in 1963). She's careful to introduce herself as a university student and make a connection with another boy ("He'll go far," the doctor remarks) before she asks for what she needs. "I want to continue my studies," she says, "It's essential for me". At this moment, Anne leans in, her arms on the doctor's desk, and pleads, unblinking. The unsaid truth here is that she too has potential in her, she too can go far. From the very moment she realises she is pregnant, there is a dogged determination in Anne. She must abort. Happening is not a story that entertains any other option. The doctor kicks her out. It is, after all, 1960s France and any person suggesting, encouraging, performing or receiving an abortion are liable for both a fine and a term of imprisonment. 

Happening is based on Ernaux's 2001 book of the same name, not a memoir as such but a recollection of an event, a book that draws attention to the act of remembering, anchored in the author's determination to "revisit every single image until I feel that I have physically bonded with it". 

Ernaux wrote her book forty years after her abortion, achingly recalling the details and minutiae of her ordeal. She calls it an 'ordeal' many times throughout the text, which implies both the prolonged experience of her trying to secure an abortion and the trauma that the whole experience meant. In Audrey Diwan's film, we don't see the older Ernaux, we only see Anne, already pregnant and fully determined to terminate. Throughout the film, she doesn't utter the word itself ("This thing had no place in language"). The secrecy, the shame and the fear is all telegraphed on Anne's face. She carries this secret within her, a ticking bomb that appears onscreen occasionally, marking the weeks that have passed. 

Ernaux's book and Diwan's film are both strikingly pragmatic. Anne's determination and drive, which are praised by her parents and her tutors and have landed her in university on a scholarship, are equally applied to this decision. It is entirely her own, and no one else's business. The illegality of it makes it infinitely more dangerous, but what's not questioned at all is the decision. Not even the doctor's or her classmate's smirks can shift Anne's decision. So, more than a film about abortion, Happening is a woman defending "her sexual freedom, her pleasure, and her intellectual future as well", in the words of Diwan. But this defence does not come in the form of a big speech, or a confrontation, it materialises entirely through mundane actions. Diwan's direction focuses on Anne's body and face until it becomes not just hers but ours. Through every attempt at ridding herself of her pregnancy, Vartolomei's eyes widen and glisten and we feel the jolt of pain. When her legs spasm involuntarily, we tense up as though it's us being probed. Happening is a film of the body, by design. When Ernaux writes up the minutiae of her ordeal, especially her eventual encounter with a clandestine abortionist, she's not quite seeking any words of comfort, instead, she finds it in the focus on the details: "This emphasis on practicality was strangely comforting. No feelings, no morals". Diwan achieves the same effect by focusing on the logic of the body. 

There is another layer to Happening's pragmatism, displayed only in hints and glances in the film. In that scene with the doctor, Anne appeals to her potential. She doesn't say it, but she is the first person in her family who's attending university. It's her ticket out of the working class. The shame she carries within her is not the shame of getting pregnant or having sex, or getting an abortion, is her perceived failure in escaping from "the legacy of poverty", which she sees embodied "by both the pregnant girl and the alcoholic". Throughout the film, she visits her family's bar, and she's commended on her "gift", her hands untarnished by factory and retail work. There's an unspoken sense of responsibility not just to her own future and her own potential, but to the expectations placed on her by her family to not fail in the way girls like her were expected to ("I saw the thing growing inside of me as the stigma of social failure", Ernaux writes). 

Happening, both book and film, achieve a singular thing: Anne's story is specific and general all at once. The situation might be particular to her, a talented student, a future great author, a young woman in 1960s France, but it's not exclusive to her experience. Hers echoes the experiences of a myriad of other women, unspoken, unwritten and unchronicled. The details might be different, but the truth of the body remains the same. 

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Anna Bogutskaya is a London-based freelance film programmer, broadcaster, writer and creative producer. Co-founder of the horror film collective The Final Girls and Festival Director of Underwire Festival. Previous Film and Events Programmer at the BFI. Has worked on international projects for Pedro Almodóvar's El Deseo. Selected as one of Screen International's Future Leaders in Curation and Programming in 2019 and invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.