Happening (L'événement)

Happening (L'événement)
* * * * - 2021 - R - 1h 40m

In 1963 student Anne has a bright future ahead of her but her dreams of finishing her studies is shattered when she becomes pregnant. As her final exams approach Anne decides to take matters into her own hands.

An adaptation of Annie Ernaux's eponymous novel looking back on her experience with abortion when it was still illegal in France in the 1960s.

Based on Annie Ernaux's semi-autobiographical novel Happening follows Annie a bright young student who faces an unwanted pregnancy while abortion was still illegal in 1960s France.

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Review by SANDRA HALL

It's 1963 and Anna (Anamaria Vartolomei) is helping two of her friends to tighten their bras in a bid to achieve maximum effect at that night's university dance.

It's the last carefree evening she's going to enjoy for some time.

Happening may be looking back almost 60 years but it's no period piece. Adapted from a novel-cummemoir by French author Annie Ernaux who was a contender for last year's Nobel Prize for Literature it's all about intimacy and immediacy.

Ernaux has said that she has tried to do more than disinter old memories in the books she has mined from her personal experience. She has been out to revive her teenage self along with all the torments that went with being young.

In transferring Ernaux's story to the screen writer-director Audrey Diwan takes this aim with great seriousness refusing to let us off the hook for a moment. There's no visual shorthand. Searching close-ups and long reflective takes ensure that we're with Anna every step of the way as she tries to work out what to do about the discovery that she's pregnant after a one-night stand with a boy she met in a bookshop.

The bit about the bookshop is crucial. Anna is a reader and a scholar who's at the top of her class. From a working-class family she's also an outsider patronised by the well-heeled snobs at the university college where she lives.

Her mother (Sandrine Bonnaire) has great hopes for her future as does her literature professor and a baby would upset everything. As she sees it an abortion is her only way out but she has no idea where to go for help. As the weeks grind on her world shrinks to a single question: what is she going to do about her pregnancy?

Up to this point she has been stimulated by the waves of hostility emanating from the college rich kids buoyed up by being smarter than they are and just as pretty.

Now however she withdraws telling no one about her predicament and lapsing into silence - a test for any actor.

Yet Vartolomei makes every moment comprehensible. It's a beautifully judged performance.

When she can keep her secret no longer those she should be able to trust let her down. No doctor will risk a jail sentence and her friends are equally fearful.

From this point on there are plenty of harrowing moments and Diwan spares us none of them.

But if you're tempted to think that they couldn't happen in these enlightened times news of the right's efforts to outlaw abortion in the US serves as a reminder that Ernaux's story is timeless.