Happening

Director: Audrey Diwan

2 May 2024

See

Him: Anne (Anamarie Vartolomei) is a precocious young woman in the 1960s in France. She’s a good student, with lots of friends, and a good relationship with her parents, who run a bar in the country while she goes to boarding school in the city. Out at night she chats to a guy at a bar. Sex isn’t shown (in that scene) but she becomes pregnant and her world implodes, with no legal recourse to terminate the pregnancy. 

Think

Him: Seeing the taboo is sickening. No one wants to talk about it. Not doctors, or friends, and she’s increasingly desperate and isolated. In such circumstances how does one find the merciful help of adame Riviere (Anna Mougalis)?

Feel

Him: Annie Ernaux is one of my gaps, one that needs to be filled since she the 2022 Nobel laureate for literature. This film is based on her eponymous novel,  as usual the complexity and nuance of the subject being a book makes me want to read it. It’s eerily prescient of Roe v Wade being repealed in the United States, some of the most restrictive abortion bans in the Western world have come into effect. Women’s control over their own bodies leads to their emancipation and options for which way their life will go. As a famous protest sign goes, held by an old woman, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit.”