Audrey Diwan’s masterly second feature, “Happening,” is the story of a young woman trying to save her own life; a harrowing, tense and utterly riveting survival story. The question of whether or not our young heroine, Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), racing against the clock, will make it out with her future intact is the urgently dramatic question at hand.
“Happening” is the story of an abortion, one that the French writer Annie Ernaux underwent in her early 20s as a college student, in 1960s France, when abortion was illegal there. It was an experience that she documented in her 2000 memoir “L’événement,” which Diwan and Marcia Romano adapted for the screen. “Happening,” which won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, and could prove to be the most important film of 2022, is a powerful argument for life: for Anne’s life, in fact, and her right to live hers how she chooses.
Anne is a brilliant literature student, with a couple of close friends (Louise Orry-Diquéro and Luàna Bajrami), academically minded girls who are just starting to explore flirtations and boys, or so it seems. When we see Anne check her underwear, and write “still nothing” in her calendar diary, we don’t need to see the inciting incident to know. When her family doctor gives her the news, her choice is immediate, firm and unwavering. She demands, “do something!” Alas, he replies, “the law is unsparing.”
