‘Happening’ and the value of individual choices in the face of oppression
By Jake Skubish
“Hélène, can you help me?” asks Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) in the opening scene of Happening. Anne is struggling to fasten a safety pin to the back of her friend Brigette’s (Louise Orry-Diquéro) bra. The trio are college students, and their priority for the night is to arrange an outfit that will draw attention at a party on campus.
It’s a fitting opening scene for a movie within the abortion drama canon, a genre that has been defined by stories of female friendship and support. The standout entries — 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Never Rarely Sometimes Always; Unpregnant — are nearly identical in their structure: one friend gets pregnant, and the other accompanies them on a challenging journey to find medical help. Céline Sciamma’s masterpiece Portrait of a Lady on Fire also features a notable abortion plotline, with an almost wordless agreement by the two lead women to help a character end her pregnancy. Dating back to Dirty Dancing, abortion in the movies has been commonly depicted as a personal trial bouyed by support from those you love — support you can count on without much uncertainty.
This is where Happening departs from the rest of the genre, and from its own deceptively communal beginning. Audrey Diwan’s film, set in 1960s France, is a vision of society ensnared with fear about the ramifications of helping someone else obtain an illegal abortion, and about how that fear affects the way we treat each other. When Anne’s doctor tells her she is pregnant, she immediately replies, “Do something.” He turns from her, sternly telling her, “You can’t ask me that. Not me, not anyone.” He’s sympathetic, but that’s no more of a help than the doctor who is outright hostile. With other authority figures, such as her professor and her parents, Anne doesn’t even test the waters of discussing her pregnancy. Diwan lingers on the faces of these characters for brief moments, giving the sense that they are more than willing to indulge in the concealment. They may want to help, but not more than they want to protect themselves by pretending they don’t know what’s going on.
The same goes for her friends: When Anne ventures to tell them about her pregnancy, they can only think of themselves. Brigette and Hélène stop speaking to her altogether, afraid of the possibility they might lose out on their education. “It’s not our problem,” Brigette says defiantly. Jean, a male friend, tries to kiss Anne after learning of the pregnancy, telling her, “There’s no risk if you’re pregnant.” The women in Anne’s life fail to act due to fear; the men fail to act in order to preserve power.
Diwan makes an interesting point in these moments by questioning the honesty of Brigette and Hélène’s supposed intimate friendship with Anne. The friends lounge on top of each other, share the same piece of gum, and discuss sex, and for them these are acts of intimacy. But when it really matters and Anne is in a moment of need, it all evaporates. There is a parallel to their understanding of politics: Over lunch one day they discuss the inspiring politics of Camus and the confused politics of Sartre. But they are unable to see that the true political activity is their denial of support for Anne. Answering a question about a Louis Aragon poem during a literature lecture, Anne explains that Aragon “uses a lover’s drama to evoke a national one. It’s a political poem.” Such is the mission of Happening, to remove us from the overwhelming machinery of policymaking and place the viewer inside the psychological ramifications of oppression.
And so Anne must carry on with most of this journey on her own. Diwan nestles the camera right behind Anne’s head for much of the runtime, emphasizing the distance between her private thoughts and the world around her. It’s a distance deliberately created by the abortion ban, calcifying the risk of trusting anyone around her. The landscape of the French university campus in Happening is lush, canopied with rustling trees and suffused with soft sunshine. It’s a serenity that seems to willfully deny that anything sinister is happening beneath it, a perspective Diwan accentuates by tinting the frame with Instagram-like tones. The effect creates the imagery of an old photograph come alive, implying that the brutality thought by some to be trapped in amber is alive still today.
Happening is often brutal (a few scenes, in particular, may be difficult to watch for squeamish viewers), but the film is thankfully not entirely devoted to this framework. Diwan lends the abortion drama a welcome eye toward Anne’s experience of pleasure during this ordeal. Unlike other abortion films, our protagonist has sex even as she pursues an abortion. It’s a positive experience for her, and a moment of much-needed relief. By including this so late in the narrative, Diwan’s film insists that Anne should not have to deny herself sexual autonomy, even as the legal apparatus punishes her sexual activity. At one point a character asks Anne, “Who cares what you feel like? Can we afford to only do what we feel like?” Happening gracefully asks whether we can afford not to.
If Happening triumphs in its uniquely solitary gaze, it fails in its centering of the same perspective typically featured in abortion films, that of the young, white, thin woman with the resources and time to seek abortion services. If you learned about abortion from the movies, you might think this is the only type of person who ever gets pregnant. The typical profile of a woman who gets an abortion, however, is slightly older (late twenties), below the poverty line, and disproportionately likely to be a person of color. Happening possesses a welcome examination of the psychological burdens induced by oppressive politics, and of how policies can override sympathies and alienate individuals from those who want to help them but are too afraid to act. Yet in the story it chooses to tell Happening slides into the same stereotypical archetype usually shown on screen, limiting the reach of who this message seems to apply to.
Still, Diwan’s framing of the story, showcasing the consequences of individual choices within a larger political struggle, is a poignant and oft-ignored perspective. In the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, the tendency among those decrying the decision was to focus on the daunting structural barriers toward restoring abortion rights. In an incisive New Yorker article, Jia Tolentino wrote about the dawning era and inevitably tragic consequences of “widespread state surveillance and criminalization” of abortion. News outlets wrote about the states with immediate abortion bans. The aftermath of the decision has been heartbreaking, and it will continue to cause dire outcomes on a scale that feels beyond our control.
The sort of coverage written by Tolentino is both courageously righteous and vitally informative, and it is valuable for understanding the landscape of what those fighting for reproductive rights now face. Overcoming these systemic hurdles will take time, and what we can do as individuals is simply not enough.
Diwan’s film, however, suggests that even if our individual choices are not enough, what we do to support each other does matter. Some people choose to turn away from Anne, others help her in ways big and small, and each choice is monumentally important for her future. In the moment it is not clear whether these choices will dramatically improve the future, but they are what can be done today. Happening is a moral tale, and recalls a teaching of the Talmud, that whoever saves a single life is considered to have saved the whole world. This lesson is not told triumphantly in the film, but it is made firmly in defiance of a world that deliberately alienates those who might support each other. Happening demonstrates the value of contributing such support, even when it does not feel like enough.
Happening is available for rental on Amazon Video.