Happening (2021), by Audrey Diwan
“Happening” is a brutal movie. Brutal for those who are able to put themselves in the lead’s shoes and ask: what if this was happening to me? Brutal because this is happening to thousands of girls, women and other people with an uterus every single day, all around the world. Brutal because, even in the countries where this didn’t happen anymore, there is an effort to make this happen again. “This” is going through an illegal and unsafe abortion — because yes, there can be an illegal yet safe abortion. “Happening” tells in 100 minutes three months of uncertainty, fear, of a real torture that happened to Anne Ernaux, a well-known writer who was bold enough to write, in detail, about the abortion she had in 1963, more than 10 years before France legalized the procedure.
In her early twenties, Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) is doing a prep course in Literature — to wish to go to college is something that puts her in a different pedestal from the rest of her family, comprised mostly of factory workers — and she is a brilliant student. Everything goes sour when she misses her period. The worst is confirmed by a doctor: Anne is pregnant. What follows is the classic scene of the woman looking at her body in a mirror and imagining the changes. Anne is pregnant — and she’ll do anything to not be anymore.
Anne sees another doctor who listens to her saying that she wishes “to continue studying” and understands what Anne wants. Her friends say that they won’t help her, as they are afraid of being arrested. Anne can’t focus anymore in the intellectual tasks from her class and in the harmless talks with other girls — in the book she says that her condition took her away from the normal world. Weeks after telling Jean (Kacey Mottet Klein) about her “issue”, Anne is introduced to Laetitia (Alice de Lencquesaing), who gives her the number of a woman who performs abortions. Here, an observation: I loved the name given to the girl who is a bridge between Anne and the abortionist, not only because I have the same name as her, but mainly because Laetitia means “joy / happiness” in Latin. It is Laetitia who will restore Anne’s happiness.
From Anne Ernaux to Audrey Diwan: comparing the book and the movie
Anne Ernaux’s book — one of these books so raw that you can’t read it quickly — is a short read but one that takes time, not because its complexity, but because its emotional approach. Published in 2000, almost forty years after the happening, the text was adapted to the screen by Audrey Diwan herself, with the help of Marcia Romano, Anne Berest and Alice Girard. A work by women for a story of women.
Even though we understand how difficult it is to make a film from a book made of mainly memories and feelings, some changes made for the screen are not easily understood. In the book, the three months between the discovery of the pregnancy and the abortion are terrible winter months, while in the film the horror happens during summer. It’s clear that the change was made so Anne experiences the happening while her finals are getting near, adding another layer of urgency. There is also the choice of creating a clique that dislikes Anne, transforming Olivia, the O. from the book, in one of the bullies who becomes Anne’s savior in the most crucial moment.
And it’s a shame, really, that not all the details of the book made it into the film. Some notes could have become scenes, such as this, right in the beginning of the book: “When I made love and climaxed, I felt that my body was basically no different from that of a man.” Imagine how potent it would be to portray a young woman who feels just like a man when talking about sex and all of a sudden realizes that there is an abyss separating men and women.
In the book, there are many meta moments in which Anne writes about her act of writing about the happening. These are linguistically magical moments, impossible to film. But there are also memorable lines in the movie, like the answer Anne gives to her teacher when he asks if she had been sick: “yes, with a sickness that only happens to women and turns them into housewives”.
The abortion scene, already cinematic in the book, is less emotional in the movie — but only for those who read the book and could imagine all that. It’s not a really graphic scene, but it can make people groan, scared.
During the narrative, something that calls the attention are the several men who cross Anne’s path: the pro-contraception activist who can’t help her, the doctor N. who knows that she wants to abort and prescribes injections of a component to avoid a miscarriage (and later prescribes another medicament to stop the ongoing abortion), the many men who show true curiosity about her story, the young doctor who first mistreats her, then feels sorry for mistreating a college student (something that is much more than most doctors do today), dr V, the family doctor, a good Christian who votes for the right, who even gets aroused with the abortion.
From the women, at least she receives no sermon: her best friends show concern, O. shows curiosity and even helps Anne in a crucial moment, L. B. is an angel and gives Anne the abortionist’s number. It may not happen like in “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”, in which the three main characters help each other when one of them has an abortion, but at least in “Happening” the women don’t stand in Anne’s way — something that, once again, doesn’t happen often in the real world.
Audrey Diwan faced many challenges in order to make “Happening”. Because of the theme of the film, she had a hard time finding funding, and in many occasions was told: “why are you making a movie about illegal abortion if it is now legal in France?”. As we saw in the last month of June in the USA, a single decision may destroy a basically consolidated right — and, as Simone de Beauvoir once said, in a crisis women’s rights are the first to be questioned.
The Happening in women’s lives
What happens to Anne happens every day. It’s because we know this that the sequence with the needle attempt is so painful for empathetic people. It’s because we know this that Laetitia’s words are true in 1963’s France and, unfortunately, in 2022’s USA: if you end up in a hospital, you either are lucky to have someone classify your case as “miscarriage” or an asshole writes “abortion” in your papers and you end up arrested or dead.
A detail may not be noticed by most readers and viewers, but it is fuel for the evil-minded: the mention that a contraceptive injection could end the pregnancy. This gives fuel to the fake news saying that “contraceptives are legalized abortifacients”. Of course, both in the book and the movie we learned that the injection was estradiol, to give strength to the embryo and avoid a miscarriage. Awful doctors believing they are gods are nothing new in France — nor here.
With the insertion of a catheter, the abortionist ends the pregnancy through the stimulation of a premature labor, but not all abortions are like this. As we said before, not all illegal abortions have to be unsafe: they can happen, in a very safe way, through the use of pills such as misoprostol and mifepristone in the first few weeks of pregnancy, or surgically when the pregnancy has been going on for over 12 weeks. This latter case was shown in the short film “Just Don’t Fuck” (1971), by director Carole Roussopoulos. In it, a real abortion is filmed, and it happens in front of the camera in an easy and professional way because there are doctors there who really care about the patient’s wellbeing. When we think about the short movie, we come back to a question from Anne’s book: “Is abortion bad because it’s forbidden or is it forbidden because it’s bad?”. Because it isn’t and shouldn’t be either.
For Anne, the abortion was a reason to be proud, a path to salvation, an occasion in which she “didn’t know if she had been in front of the horror or the beauty”. Dr N., like liberal feminists and feminist men would do, tries to induce her to transform the abortion in an individual victory — apart from the violence she suffered, Anne says. Abortion is not something to be celebrated nor disapproved. Abortion is something to be normalized. In a movie, like in life, and abortion is not a happy ending: it’s an opportunity to start again.
