One of the more interesting bits of entertainment news as of late was the announcement that French director Audrey Diwan's next project would be a fresh new adaptation of Emmanuelle, the notorious erotic novel about the titular heroine who finds herself torn between hedonism and lovesickness through a series of bisexual escapades, all set against the backdrop of exotic Bangkok and its expatriate community of well-off libertines. With the lovely Léa Seydoux set to star, there's no telling what Diwan and writing partner Rebecca Zlotowski have in store. But if you happen to see Diwan's most recent film Happening as its specialty run begins to open up after limited premieres two weeks ago, there's at least one scene that can't help but encourage the viewer that such a story is in capable hands. Which is to say, the scene would suffice, if the entire stellar picture didn't say so.
Happening (titled L'événement or The Event in the original French) is, of course, no erotic film. Itself an adaptation of a 2000 novel by author Annie Ernaux, the film is set in the early-'60s and stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne, a university student who unhappily discovers that she has gotten herself pregnant with only months before her final exams. Derived from Ernaux's semi-autobiographical writing, and based on her own experiences procuring an abortion over a decade before the procedure was finally legalized in France, the film then follows the passionate choreography of Anne's emotional and physical decline, her once promising academic career slipping through her hands as she is both shunned and slut-shamed by her peers, and is then compelled to take ever riskier gambles with her life and health in order to terminate her pregnancy.
By likening the narrative of Happening to a "passionate choreography," I will admit that I am still perhaps too enamored with that insight made by Béatrice Dalle in Lux Æterna, in which she praised the "choreography" of traditional depictions of the Passion of the Christ, highlighting its inherently lurid spectacle of suffering and betrayal. Make no mistake, though, there is something very allegorical, very Passion-esque about Vartolomei's suffering in Diwan's film. No orthodox Catholic would ever countenance such a comparison, of course. But it's no secret that Christ himself, even as he admonished harlots to "go and sin no more," at least defended them in the face of adversity. What's more, as Anne is denied by her friends, as she is ridiculed by her peers, as the judges of her sexually repressive society wash their hands of responsibility for her plight and turn away, and then as she stumbles (three times, no less!) in her various attempts at abortion, all on the road to a violent and elegiac denouement that suggests nothing short of our heroine's near death and open-ended resurrection, I think it's quite fitting to describe Happening as a passion play of sorts. Here, the modern young woman denied her sexual autonomy is set on her own road to Golgotha, the object of suffering in a weighty historical parable about persecution, moral hypocrisy, and, hopefully, absolution. "They all want the same thing, they just won't admit it," Anne says bitterly in her "Forgive them, for they know not"-moment, observing the sexual tension that pervades her peers, and the cruel absurdity of how women especially bear the burden of a culture of silence.
What follows that moment, though, is something that no traditional passion play has, which is the final hook-up scene. Defiant on the verge of the dangerous and illicit road she's treading, Anne nonetheless takes advantage of one of the leering firefighters that hang around the night clubs looking for wayfaring college girls. Diwan and cinematographer Laurent Tangy favor a soft and shallow focus, close-ups, and long hand-held takes in order to impress the viewer with the quiet desperation of Vartolomei's beautiful performance, pushing us into a deep physical intimacy with her that, like the notion of abortion and birth control itself, goes beyond the sexual, at least as it is defined in the pornographic or patriarchal sense. This same approach to visual storytelling inevitably makes Diwan's unflinching, rather graphic depiction of the medical realities of a world without legal abortion all the more nerve-shattering. (Strangely, nobody seems to be particularly wowed by attention to detail here, or at least not in the same way as they are with Robert Eggers' The Northman.) Nonetheless, Anne's dalliance with the fireman proves the filmmakers' remarkable ability to both shock us with the brute address of their story, the abjection and injustice faced by women at the most visceral and bodily level; while also driving home the sense of personal gravity when Anne takes control, stops concerning herself with what others think, and follows where her desire leads with fear of repercussion, perhaps, but also ambivalence about those repercussions. There is a mournful, purgatorial fatalism to the film, but while its student characters talk of Camus, Anne finds in her Sissyphian struggle moments of poignant elation, of new certitude that she is forging her own meaning against the perfidy of a cruel and vacant world. Certifying that their adaptation cannot be interpreted as merely the prolonged punishment of a woman's sexual indiscretion, Diwan crafts a truly erotic scene that emboldens the viewer, in perhaps the most direct way possible, to never take question of reproductive rights for granted.
Happening is no maudlin agitprop, though it had to finally find U.S. distribution through IFC and FilmNation at the precise moment when the incrementalist strategy of every blood-glutton misogynist in this vile country finally paid off and abortion rights guarantees were basically set back to square negative-one. France has its own reactionary drift problems, and the irony is that, before Happening was getting its Golden Lion at the 78th Venice International Film Festival last September, BAC Nord, a cop drama Diwan co-wrote with frequent collaborator Cédric Jimenez, was getting called a far-right piece. (Streaming on Netflix as The Stronghold, the film is, indeed, a rather middle-of-the-road thriller that gives a good summation of Diwan's career as a screenwriter before she began directing.) This is to say that Happening is a lot more deliberate and subtle when imagined from a French perspective. Abortion was legalized in France in 1975, but only up to the tenth week of pregnancy. Subsequent liberalizations of abortion law in France have led to the gradual loosening of these limits, and it was only this year that it got bumped up to a whole fourteen weeks. Of course, Anne's pregnancy lasts well into twelve weeks. The film is haunted by the sense of its placement in time, by the chasm between what is right for its protagonist and the actual point at which she could receive de jure recourse. In France, Happening, or L'événement, grabs ahold of your collar and advocates for you to not take life for granted. In America, the same film, with a less elegant title that suggests more beat music odyssey than social drama, grabs you by the collar and throttles you, screaming, "What the Hell just happened?!"
But it would be far beneath the filmmakers' credit to reduce Happening to merely an "eerily-timed" message movie. (Leave that dubious honor to Iuli Gerbase's The Pink Cloud.) What you have here is easily one of the most invested, emotionally earnest dramas you're likely to see this year, and a stupendous showing for Diwan as a director. Its passion and vitality certainly bodes well for the very different roads she may follow as a filmmaker.
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