“I’ll manage.” We hear those words a lot from Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), the quietly determined 23-year-old who grounds every scene of the tense, harrowing French drama “Happening.” She’s used to taking care of herself, whether she’s in a literature class, where she dissects a poem with ease, or on a crowded dance floor, where she attracts and deflects a lot of male attention. It’s telling that the director, Audrey Diwan, often films Anne from behind, her dark brown hair tied back in a ponytail that bobs slightly as the camera tracks her down a sunlit street or a dim hallway. Anne always seems to know where she’s going, even when the unthinkable happens and her life and her body begin to feel like bewilderingly alien territory.
“Happening,” winner of the Golden Lion at last fall’s Venice International Film Festival, follows Anne over a period of several weeks as she seeks to terminate a pregnancy. Since the story is set in 1963, when abortion was still illegal in France, her ordeal unfolds under a miserable cloud of shame and secrecy. The movie, adapted by Diwan and Marcia Romano from Annie Ernaux’s sharply observed 2000 memoir, unfolds in the southwestern town of Angoulême, where Anne is a top university student. But it also returns us to a more broadly recognizable era when doctors couldn’t perform abortions openly for fear of losing their licenses or worse, and when even the mere act of helping a woman procure an abortion could land a person in prison.
And as the events of this past week in the U.S. have reminded us, that era, seemingly locked away in the past, may well be the future that awaits us. Diwan, deploying the period details with a subtle hand, immerses us in a vision of the early ’60s that, minus a few plaid skirts and pay phones, might just about pass for the present day. To call this movie timely would be both an understatement and a bit of a misnomer, since the battle for women’s bodily autonomy has never not been a timely issue. It might be more fitting to praise “Happening” for its urgency, not just because it arrives in American theaters under particularly fraught circumstances, but also because of the gut-clutching suspense and the wrenching intimacy that the director brings to the telling.
