X Close

The disappointment of Happening They exist to make viewers feel like good people

It's all so... profound. Credit: IMDB.

It's all so... profound. Credit: IMDB.


May 23, 2022   7 mins

Audrey Diwan’s Happening, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and has a “100% Fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes, is as lauded as a film can be. Whether the appearance of acclaim makes this — the latest entry in the genre of prestige, festival-circuit abortion drama — a good film is a different matter.

Much has been lost in this cinematic adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s autofiction L’événément (2000). However, one mourns little. That slim book largely consists of self-indulgent and painfully predictable reflections on l’événement of l’écriture. Across her curiously prolific output of almost identical autofictions — punctuated by a few, mostly early, highlights — the author’s 1963 abortion holds especial place as the subject of not one but two texts: her début Les Armoires vides (1974) and its tedious reprisal, the source material for the present adaptation.

In brief, Ernaux, the daughter of a Normand grocer, the first person in her family to attend university, is a few months from graduation when she becomes pregnant by a bourgeois student from Bordeaux. Having the child will, she believes, doom her dreams of finishing her education and becoming a writer. In the months that follow, and with no help from the father, she desperately pursues a back-alley abortion; she finally ends up finding a marmish hospital nurse who performs such operations—for 400 francs—in her Batignolles apartment. Her procedure lands her in a hospital after dangerous haemorrhaging, a near-death experience without which, she tells us in the last pages, she wouldn’t have wanted to ever be a mother. 

One can safely guess why Happening is considered good: it is “urgent” and “timely,” as we have been helpfully informed by critics everywhere. The film received its US release by IFC films on May 6, three days after the release of a draft ruling penned by Justice Alito, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, which would overrule Roe v. Wade. One could not have prayed for better timing.

Before that leak, director Diwan was questioned — particularly, by potential financiers — as to whether her film had any real social urgency. Indeed, in February, the French parliament extended the legality of abortion from 12 to 14 weeks after conception, despite fleeting opposition from Emmanuel Macron. Whatever timeliness might have been lacking in the French release, the stateside one has now been ensured a rapturous reception, a felicity not lost on the director: the screening I attended was preceded by a brief recording of Diwan and lead actress Anamaria Vartolomei stating that the film was of imperative importance, given these times we find ourselves in, that if we did not understand what illegal abortion was like, it would be impossible to preserve the right to legal abortion, et cetera.

It’s as simple as that: the point of this film is to show an illegal abortion, so that one might be convinced to support the right to legal abortion. This is of a piece with a pretty popular middlebrow idea of the role of art (see this much-cited study demonstrating fiction’s power to create “empathy”.) And yet, it’s hard to imagine this film convincing anyone who is currently against, say, the legacy of Roe to really change their tune; as I understand it, most of those who want Roe repealed subscribe to a contestable but fairly simple chain of inference: life begins at conception, therefore killing a foetus at any point is murder. Murder is immoral, and immoral things must be illegal. Thus, killing a foetus at any point must be illegal. 

This calculus doesn’t provide much room for manoeuvre, and the presumed Dobbs opinion, for example, doesn’t partake of the harm reductionist logic behind this sort of scare-tactic filmmaking. The only person for whom a film such as Happening could move the needle is, I guess, an anti-Roe person who hasn’t realised that back-alley abortions direly endanger the lives of the women who receive them (does such a person exist?). And is that exceptionally sheltered pro-life person, if she does, going to be watching a French art film? 

More likely, Happening is an example of preaching to the choir, and there, I wonder whether it might defeat its own purpose. After all, many rallying cries to Americans around abortion rights relate to incursions on the right to end pregnancy in the second trimester; for example, the Mississippi law at issue in Dobbs bans abortion after the 15th week, i.e. almost four months into pregnancy, and, one might note, after well over 90% of abortions are actually performed.

In Ernaux’s memoir, when the foetus is finally expunged after the insertion of two illegal probes, the narrator recounts that “a baby doll” falls out of her; the film is just as gruesome, showing the lead actress hunched over a toilet, red-faced and sweaty as what is visibly a child dangles from her and she breathlessly begs her bourgeois hallmate to cut the umbilical cord. 

Your casual abortion advocate might not tend to think, when she contemplates laws like that Mississippi one, about the fact that a late-second trimester foetus has foetus has fingernails, limbs, etc. Is this scene actually going to make anyone support abortion rights more? This is one problem of the illegal abortion genre — the harder to procure an abortion, and the riskier it is, the more awful the actual act appears.

What about that scene in the notable 2007 Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (a far more original work) in which the abortionist warns the woman not to throw the foetus, “whole or in pieces” in the toilet, which it’ll clog up, or outside, where dogs might eat it? Perversely, some might leave the movies newly doubting the trimester-viability-undue burden framework of Roe v. Wade (as modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey). And perhaps they might not come out supporting, say, the Democratic bill enshrining Roe and Casey, a bill so expansive that, say opponents like Sen. Susan Collins, it might preempt state bans on even sex-selective abortions.

Happening isn’t a film to change minds — it’s about rallying the troops to protest, vote, or at least make some targeted political donations — but one should wish for more from their art than a Pavlovian bell. One might wish to experience the uniqueness of a human experience, or something of the sort. Instead, despite what Indiewire may have protested in its Sundance review, this film is squarely didactic, with dialogue so implausible and condescending as to almost insult the audience: Girl to doctor who refuses to perform abortion: “I want to continue my studies; that’s the most important thing for me.” Doctor to Girl: “No scandals in my office!”; Girl: “I would like to have a child one day, but not instead of a life; I would hate the child for that!”; Proud teacher to student, after she has an abortion and resumes performing well in class: “Have you been sick?”; Student to proud teacher: “Yes, with that illness that only affects women, and turns them into housewives!”

The message here is that Anne is a “brilliant student” who must have an abortion to preserve that career. But her brilliance is alluded to by gestures so heavy-handed — a facile lunchtime conversation about Camus and Sartre (“Camus really pierces you — Sartre, it’s more complicated!”); watching her friend teach her how to masturbate (a scene not in the memoir) with a Sartre poster in the background; raising money for the abortion (a scene not in the memoir) by selling, inter alia, Sartre’s Le Mur for 3 francs — that one can do little more than laugh. Given that the price for Anne’s literary career is a dangerous abortion, one might wish the output to be a little more impressive. 

This cinematic Anne is far from a captivating character, far from a reflection of a complicated young woman, far from a figure to remind one of women’s need for self-determination and their infinite capabilities. She is simply a boring, paint-by-numbers “smart girl,” one among many predictable indicia that this is an “art film” (handheld camera, lens flare, and — it’s European — a lot of nudity). Despite all the laudatory reviews and Diwan’s discussion of her portrayal of “silence” in film, it unfortunately remains the fact that having a lead actress with large eyes, and a screenplay full of short lines and pauses does not a meaningful statement make. 

Instead, Diwan’s film is ultimately so withholding as to say, well, nothing. The AV Club has hailed this film as “life-affirming”; but one wonders what there is to affirm, since our lead does, well, nothing besides look for an abortion and go to bars to talk to pretty unappealing men. In comparison, the scenes of the horrible, claustrophobic fate awaiting her — her parents listening to the radio and eating and laughing together — don’t seem half-bad.

I suppose this is a central failure of “the abortion film”. A director of any intelligence — and in this category, I include both Diwan and Eliza Hittman, whose Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020) was something of a let-down after her earlier triumphs —  is attuned to the reality of sex for the very young and not-rich woman, to the ways her desire to have sex is far from the entirely free, unbounded, pleasure-driven free-for-all conservatives often imagine and vilify. Rather, fornication is often a quietly humiliating and disappointing compromise, whose pay-off for girls is far from clear. But the young women of these films have almost nothing to celebrate. Agit-prop can be exuberant; one watching an East German film, for example, might sober up into clarity, but at the time feel completely transported by the dream of worker solidarity. But despite online calls to “shout your abortion”, obtaining an abortion isn’t actually a moment of joy (indeed, the idea it is plays into reactionary fantasies of gleeful abortion-on-demand). Nor, in these films, does fornication seem worth fighting for. 

Art about sexually “immoral” young women can be profound; take Maurice Pialat’s A nos amours (1983), or Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009), which Diwan told her actors to watch. In those films, we care about the constraints on the young women at their centre precisely because their lives are not mere suffering; these are lives full of the joy and chaos of sex and the ecstasy of dancing and the shock and wonder of becoming, with whatever infirmity, an adult. These films treat their audiences like adults deserving of characters, not mere symbols of good and bad, and worthy of art, not mere homages to the audience’s own virtue. 

No one may permit themselves to voice any of these misgivings. A film like this demands its accolades, assuming the right political boxes are ticked — and no one will seriously question whether that box-ticking achieves anything. For a film so uninventive and so empty, it’s astonishing that the most criticism it has had is a timid observation from the Washington Post that since we know this is a memoir by someone who, obviously, survived, “the nerve-racking nature of the events depicted is somewhat mitigated”.

That’s an understatement. The film develops no character, inhabits a gratingly artificial time capsule, and engages only in the most sophomoric political reflection. What does one really gain from seeing it? Neither entertainment nor edification. But by sitting through this and subsequently remarking on its “urgency” and “timeliness”, one gains a tidy bit of proof that they’re a very good person.

“In these times,” then, Happening’s critics are hamstrung. 


Ann Manov is a writer living in New York. Visit her website here.

ann_manov

Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

8 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
2 years ago

Personally I’m looking forward to the Top Gun sequel – that really is urgent and timely.

Samir Iker
Samir Iker
2 years ago

The problem with this whole debate is that the pro-abortion activists pretend it’s about abortion per se (the majority of even conservatives are fine with first term abortions) or evil right wingers banning contraception or making it illegal even in rape cases etc.

All that is just drama, emotional blackmail to try and browbeat people for the real issue: second and third term abortions, and not just for emergency health reasons but at the whim and fancy of the mother. At s stage where the “foetus” is clearly not s clump of cells.

Garrett R
Garrett R
2 years ago
Reply to  Samir Iker

It’s hard to take conservatives seriously when state reps (see OH) wanted to ban even ectopic pregnancy abortions, OK reps want to ban at the moment of conception, TX & MO want to prosecute state residents for out of state services, and McConnell has floated a national abortion ban.

Republicans are as extreme as they say they are. They will absolutely force an 11 year old to carry a product of rape and incest to term, even if it kills her. Plenty of state bills say this. Stop excusing extremists and embrace what Rs have become: extreme.

This isn’t drama and shouldn’t be used as such.

J Hop
J Hop
2 years ago
Reply to  Garrett R

Those cases are rare. Most Republicans are like DeSantis in Florida, which bans abortion after first trimester except in cases where the mother’s life are in danger. Oklahoma and Alabama will always be nutty and are not the majority.
The view that abortion should be legal up until birth, however, has become a mainstream Democrat position.

Christopher Peter
Christopher Peter
2 years ago

Good article, which nails completely the problematic relationship between activism and art. Of course there will always be such a relationship, and it will always be complicated. The biggest problem usually arises when the “right” message trumps all else, and when conventional opinion fawns over art just because it already agrees with the message – how comforting! All of which is a classic warning sign that the art in question is crushingly conventional – how can it be otherwise if the entire “enlightened” establishment falls over itself to proclaim it (and by extension, themselves) “brave” and “important” and “edgy”? Art should only challenge other people, or make uncomfortable those who disagree with me, apparently.
Abortion is of course a fraught issue, dominated by two sides too concerned with screaming at each other to try listening to each other. What is routinely ignored, however, is the root cause, which is modern society’s determination that sexual intercourse can and should be a risk-free and consequence-free choice. This film’s protagonist “becomes pregnant” – an interesting choice of words, as though this event just “happened”, and a supposedly intelligent and well educated young person was helpless to (and had no knowledge of how to) prevent it. Of course we can all make mistakes. But the consequences of those mistakes in some things can change a life – or end it. (I am of course ignoring the small minority of abortions where the woman has been raped – there is a broad consensus, even I would suggest among many or most “pro-lifers”, that abortion should be legal in such cases.)

Last edited 2 years ago by Christopher Peter
tom j
tom j
2 years ago

There’s no such broad consensus, for the reason Ann gives in her article. If you view abortion as you view child murder, there isn’t any wriggle room.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
2 years ago

Your point about the crushingly conventional nature of the current art establishment is well made. Since the article isn’t just about abortion but about art itself, this really matters. If artists are no longer able to (or feel able to) express dissent with the current groupthink – or if they’re marginalised as part of ‘cancel culture’ – a major route out of the cultural impasse is blocked; but only for so long…

Lennon Ó Náraigh
Lennon Ó Náraigh
2 years ago

But her brilliance is alluded to by heavy-handed gestures — a facile lunchtime conversation about Camus and Sartre

We can all throw in a casual reference to JP Sartre to boost our intellectual credibility. As the great HJ Simpson once said, Scooby doo can do, but Sartre is smarter.