Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2021) (Patreon)

Need it be said? Happening, this year's Golden Lion winner and the sophomore feature from Audrey Diwan, is timely as they come. It's a film about France in 1963, although Diwan quite strategically withholds any obvious time-period markers for the first 20 or so minutes. Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is a high school senior on the academic track, seemingly bound for a promising career as a professor. (This is displayed early, as she is the only student among dozens who can provide a cogent analysis of an Aragon poem.) This prospective future is all the more impressive given that she's from a working class family, her parents (Sandrine Bonnaire and Eric Verdin) are struggling bar owners. But it all starts slipping away when Anne discovers she's pregnant. At this time, of course, abortion is completely illegal in France.

Admirable though Happening's intentions may be, it is a rather irksome work of art. It may seem crass to simply compare it to other abortion-themed films, as if this fundamental question of women's experience were just a narrative trope that can be exhausted. And one might expect the fact that Happening was directed by a woman, and based on an acclaimed novel by Annie Ernaux, to provide richer insights. But as a complex look at the importance of women's right to choose, Happening adds very little to the conversation that wasn't already better handled in Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days or Leigh's Vera Drake. And what it does add doesn't really help.

Diwan's characterization of Anne, and especially the monomaniacal, soft-Dardennes cinematography by blockbuster journeyman Laurent Tangy, insistently asserts the protagonist's exceptional status. She is stronger, smarter, and more beautiful than everyone around her at all times, as if her right to terminate a pregnancy were contingent upon her inherent specialness. This is a fairly mainstream cinematic move, making certain narrative and political points inarguable on account of the radiance and glamour of the character involved. And while Diwan may well have a point that women can take nothing for granted any longer where reproductive rights are concerned, her creative solution to that problem is more than a little insulting to the viewer.

Then again, part of the trouble here may have to do with adapting the novel in question. I strongly suspect that Anne's inner life may not be entirely accessible in Ernaux's prose, but this is just a guess from discussions of the book I've read. I haven't read it myself. Diwan clearly feels uncomfortable with the obdurate bearing of her protagonist, perhaps fearful that audiences might perceive it as a sense of entitlement. So Happening takes great pains to show us who Anne is, how much more mature and clear-sighted she is than those around her, to make sure we aren't made uncomfortable by the fact that this young woman does in fact want abortion on demand and without apology. 

In fact, a discussion among Anne and her friends Hélène (Luàna Bajrami) and Brigitte (Louise Orrey-Diquéro) gives the game away. They have been reading Sartre and Camus, who are of course relatively contemporary at this time. Anne expresses a preference for Camus, since she rejects Sartre's Stalinism. But the point is clear: Anne is an existentialist, and as such maintains a fundamental belief in her rights and responsibilities as a human being. We are to judge her by her acts, not some internal psychology. But this attitude, Diwan seems to think, is not readily comprehensible to a present-day viewer, for whom nearly all rights are staked on the question of identity. So she punts, giving us a film pitched straight down the middle toward the ideological biases of the bourgeois arthouse spectator. Truly a wasted opportunity.