Hap­pen­ing

There is no moral equiv­a­lence between a pro-choice and pro-life stance. It’s san­i­ty ver­sus insan­i­ty. So says Audrey Diwan’s con­sum­mate­ly hard-hit­ting dra­ma Hap­pen­ing, which is based on a mem­oir by the French writer Annie Ernaux. This is not a polit­i­cal­ly didac­tic film, nor a lapel-shak­ing polemic, but a film whose oblig­a­tion towards fine dra­mat­ic authen­tic­i­ty suc­ceeds in con­vinc­ing that this is the cor­rect way of think­ing, and any alter­na­tives are incorrect.

It is, in that sense, a vital, sober­ing work in the light of cur­rent free­doms being torn away from women across the world by fun­da­men­tal­ist law­mak­ers and ding­bat zealots, and one hopes it will trav­el far and wide – because of and not despite its unsen­ti­men­tal depic­tion of a teenage woman seek­ing a back­street abor­tion in ear­ly 1960s France when the pro­ce­dure was illegal.

Ana­maria Var­tolomei gives what needs to be giv­en (which is an extra­or­di­nary amount) in the role of Anne, a pep­py, flir­ta­tious young lit­er­a­ture stu­dent who dreams of becom­ing a teacher. But after a throw­away sum­mer­time fling, she finds her­self with stom­ach cramps and bouts of vom­it­ing – her instant reac­tion is to see her dreams slip­ping away.

The local GP con­firms it, and when she comes out straight away and asks him to do some­thing about it, he blankly refus­es, despite his more lib­er­al­ly-inclined per­son­al beliefs. This is a cli­mate where the prospect of abor­tion, which comes teth­ered to a prison sen­tence, strikes more fear in the heart than a preg­nan­cy that could erad­i­cate a woman’s right to take her life in the direc­tion she choses.

In Hap­pen­ing, there is no case for the oth­er side. There is no one attempt­ing to con­vince Anne that her actions are a fol­ly and that, in fact, this could lead to a bright future. Because Diwan is vio­lent­ly com­mit­ted to the notion of per­son­al lib­er­ty and that women should have the right to engi­neer their own des­tinies. Anne refers to her con­di­tion as ​“the dis­ease that only women get,” and she is not for a sin­gle moment swayed into think­ing that her search for a ​“cure” is an hor­ren­dous crim­i­nal act.

Mov­ing scenes at home with her restau­rant-own­er moth­er (San­drine Bon­naire) enforce the idea that women nat­u­ral­ly want the best for their chil­dren, and in most cas­es want them to have oppor­tu­ni­ties which they may have not been afford­ed. Anne cher­ish­es this view of fam­i­ly, and knows that if she were to give birth now, she would not be able con­tin­ue the lega­cy and would like­ly resent the child for ruin­ing her life.

It’s an unspar­ing and graph­ic film which places the view­er in a head­lock while pre­sent­ing the real­i­ties that a per­son with an unwant­ed foe­tus in their womb faces with­out prop­er repro­duc­tive care. The men in the film are most­ly inef­fec­tu­al, though Diwan nev­er presents them as uncar­ing mon­sters, more that they descend into a state of utter baf­fle­ment and have no idea how to accept – let alone deal with – Anne’s predicament.

The weeks since con­cep­tion tick on as chill­ing inter­ti­tles, and Anne embraces ever more dras­tic mea­sures as she knows that her win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty is nar­row­ing. Though the film states its posi­tion with unwa­ver­ing clar­i­ty, and even though it is designed as a locus for debate, the ques­tion that most will need to answer is: should the price of free­dom real­ly be this high? It’s hard to think of a film more nec­es­sary in the cur­rent moment.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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