She doesn’t tell anyone, initially not even her friends who tell one another everything – especially if it has to do with boys. And something else is different in Anne’s world. It isn’t the France we might think it is. For some reason, in all of the marvelous French films of the ‘60s, the subject of abortion never came up. The reason why is simple and surprising: abortion was absolutely forbidden.
Anne looks pale to her parents and her mother thinks she is feverish. They own a bar and they dote on Anne and are exceedingly proud of her progress in school. Anne goes to a doctor. The examination quickly lays out all of the relevant facts.
After palpitating Anne’s abdomen, the doctor asks her to remove her panties. With his hand inside her he asks, “Are you late with your period?” She doesn’t answer. “You’ve had sexual relations?” “No.” “Never?” “Never.” “No boyfriend?” He finishes and says, “You’re pregnant, miss. I’m sorry.” (That “sorry” alone is classic. It’s like he’s passed a sentence.) She sits up on the table. “It’s not possible.” “I know what it means to you.” She looks at him appealingly. “Do something,” she says. To which he trots out the usual lines: “You can’t ask me that. Not me, not anyone. The law is unsparing. Anyone who helps can end up in jail. You too. And only if you’re spared the worst. Every month, a girl tests her luck and ends up dying in extreme pain. You don’t want to be that girl.” “It isn’t fair,” she tells him. “Maybe I won’t carry it until term!” “Maybe.”
Completely on her own, Anne consults library texts about pregnancy while she experiences symptoms like increasing appetite and cravings. She consults another doctor and demands that he help her. He reluctantly prescribes something that he says will make her menstruate. (Estradiol, a hormonal steroid, which Anne learns sometime later actually strengthens the embryo.)
In her dorm a friend claiming to be a virgin, straddling a pillow, demonstrates what she learned about sex from dirty magazines. Anne looks on distraught because for her it wasn’t pleasurable and it resulted in catastrophe. It was furtive, with a boy she met in a bookstore. Next we see her vomiting in the dorm lavatory. A title tells us it’s now 5 weeks. (The titles – from 3 weeks all the way to 12 – are acceptable editorializing in the film, letting us know the progress of the pregnancy and heightening the inevitable sense of urgency that Anne is undergoing – that we are undergoing.)
The oddity of this strictly anti-abortion society is that there isn’t a trace of religion anywhere – not even a crucifix, even though France is Catholic – even more Catholic in 1963. The aloneness of Anne builds. She becomes ostracized in her dorm when she seeks help from a young fireman named Jean, who only wants sex from her because she’s “safe.” After all, she can’t get pregnant twice. So she is further isolated when word gets around that she was out with a boy. The scene where she is confronted by some other girls is quite disarmingly staged in the dorm’s common shower room. She and her accusers are all naked.
What Annie Ernaux, and the film’s director Audrey Diwan, make terribly clear is how terrorised Anne and everyone is by the laws against abortion, how Anne is stripped of a choice once she is pregnant. If word of her pregnancy gets out she’d be kicked out of school and it be the end of her future. If she gets an abortion she risks much worse, the loss of her freedom, arrest and imprisonment. When she attempts using a knitting needle, her doctor tells her she failed, adding, “accept it, you have no choice.”
Finally, Jean finds help for her (the father of the child, named Maxime, knows she is pregnant, but does nothing to help). Another girl, Letitia, had an abortion performed by a woman named Madame Riviêre. Anne does have a choice, but a hazardous one, and she takes it.
The film comes straight at you from the opening scene. It isn’t nostalgic in the least: it looks at 1963 almost as if the German Occupation were still going on – because, of course, it partly was. The anti-abortion laws in France were an odd hangover from the Nazi era. Claude Chabrol’s 1988 film, Une affaire de femmes, was set during the German Occupation and is about a woman named Marie-Louise Giraud, played by Isabelle Huppert, who performed twenty-seven abortions and was guillotined in 1943 by the Vichy authorities. The Vichy government made abortion a capital crime because of population decline. Abortion wasn’t legalised in France until 1975, two years after Roe v Wade in the US. France, along with other European countries, has since come to regard access to abortion as a woman’s – as a human – right. Now, thanks to the extreme chill caused by the Gang of Six on the Supreme Court, the French government is planning to enshrine abortion in the constitution. Some people, it seems, are more committed to liberal democracy than others.
The film follows Anne so closely that we see nothing that she doesn’t see. Even when she swims in the sea, we’re in the water with her, up to our chins (I thought I tasted salt water). It is an extremely disciplined film that, when the time comes, is as explicit about an aborted fetus as it needs to be. The cinematography is unadorned – astonishingly. Audrey Diwan avoids the usual horror of teenage films. When there is dancing in a club, we aren't subjected to blasts of ‘60s music. The only other times we hear music it's to draw us into Anne’s feelings of impending disaster.
A newcomer, Annamaria Vartolomei, plays Anne with total conviction. Sandrine Bonnaire, now 55 and wearing her age proudly, is still exquisite as Anne’s mother. There is Fabrizio Ringione, handsomely contemptible as Anne’s unhelpful doctor. And Anna Mouglalis, as the abortionist Madame Rivière, has an uncannily deep voice and strong presence.
Happening may become the film of the era, as long as Americans do something to stop their country's leaden drift toward authoritarianism. There is always November to prove if they still believe in democracy.
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