‘Happening’ director Audrey Diwan on confronting abortion taboos

When French writer/director Audrey Diwan first pitched the idea of a film adaptation of Happening, a little-known book by celebrated author Annie Ernaux, she was met with incomprehension from financiers. Since France had legalised abortion in 1975, it was felt that this searing autobiographical story of a young woman seeking an illegal termination in the 1960s was no longer relevant.

“They were telling me: ‘Why make a movie on that topic now? In France it is legal now.’ And I was like, Oh, really? I hope you’re going to say the same thing to the next film-maker who says ‘I’m going to make a movie about world war two, because obviously the war is over.’”

In fact, few could have predicted just how relevant the themes at the core of this gut-wrenching emotional thriller would turn out to be. By the time the film premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize, the landscape of women’s reproductive rights had shifted seismically, and not for the better. A US Supreme Court weighted with conservative judges appointed during the Trump presidency was threatening to reverse Roe vs Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that provided the foundations for abortion rights in the US; Poland had enforced a near-total ban on abortion earlier in the year.

The uncomfortable timeliness of the film is emphasised by Diwan’s decision to make sure that, although the story unfolds in the 1960s, the film doesn’t feel anchored in the past by heavily styled costumes and production design. “I really didn’t want to make it a period piece,” she says. “I was pretty aware that what my character was going through is now a current situation in many countries.”

Diwan, who was born in 1980, first encountered the book after she herself had an abortion and subsequently felt the need to share the experiences of other women. Despite having read many of Ernaux’s other novels, she wasn’t aware of Happening until it was recommended by a friend — an indication, she says, of the taboo that still surrounds the subject.

“I think there is a reason why I’d never seen this one before, because as soon as I talked with Annie, she told me that of all her books, this was the only one that didn’t have any media echo. Journalists were not interested. They didn’t really want to hear about the topic of illegal abortion.”

Diwan’s first reaction to the book, which details Ernaux’s experience as a promising student from a working-class background whose future hangs in the balance when she discovers she is pregnant, was shock. The contrast between her own experience of a legal termination and that of women such as Ernaux was stark. “When any woman goes through the journey of illegal abortion, there is a terrible suspense because as soon as she begins, everything depends on whom she meets. Is she going to meet someone who is going to help her? Or turn her in to the police?”

In addition to the tense central story, Diwan was also fascinated by Ernaux, both as a cultural figure and as the basis for the main character, played in the film by Anamaria Vartolomei. “The way she goes from one social class to the other, the way she talks about sex, about our sexual pleasure, desires, about our intellectual desire also. I strongly respect the character. And when I think about her in the 1960s, I was like: ‘OK, this was early to be that person.’”

I felt ready because I had things to say for myself and I didn’t want to share them with anybody else

Diwan began her career as a journalist and political scientist before moving to writing novels. But despite early acclaim, she decided she needed to live more before continuing as a novelist. She told her publisher that she was not going to write anything for 10 years. “He’s the nicest man, but he was not so pleased with the idea,” she recalls.

Meanwhile, the director Claude Chabrol had planted another seed in her mind. When presenting her with a prize for her first novel, The Making of a Lie, he told her: “This could be a movie.” The comment stayed with her. “I got that in mind. And then I was asked to write for TV, then for cinema.” She co-wrote several crime thrillers with her director husband Cédric Jimenez before making her directorial debut with the romantic drama Losing It in 2019. “I felt ready because I had things to say for myself and I didn’t want to share them with anybody else.”

Happening is only Diwan’s second feature as a director but it’s a strikingly assured piece of film-making. What makes it so effective is the fact that, through deft, emotionally attuned camerawork and inventive sound design, we are taken inside the mind and the body of the central character rather than just observing her.

This is not, it has to be said, a comfortable place to be. The film includes unflinching procedural depictions of two abortion attempts — one self-administered with knitting needles, one performed by a grim-faced, gravel-voiced backstreet abortionist. Both sequences play out in real time, both are unbearably intense and visceral watch-through-your-fingers moments.

The film shares a forthright approach to the brutal realities of illicit abortions with other films that Diwan cites as influences: Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 Cannes prize-winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s harrowing 2014 portrait of life in a Ukrainian boarding school for deaf children The Tribe. There is a tendency for films dealing with women’s reproductive rights to emphasise the aspect of jeopardy and trauma. Much rarer are films that treat abortion in a more matter-of-fact way — I can think of just one, the 2019 comedy Saint Frances.

Is it possible that films such as Happening, however brilliant, perpetuate a narrative of abortion as trauma? That normalising abortion as a part of life might help to shift perceptions? “I understand what you are saying but I disagree,” says Diwan, before suggesting that we are not at that point in the conversation yet. In fact, she says, the conversation has barely started.

She had a moment of reckoning on the plane to Venice for the film’s premiere. Having worked for three years confronting the taboos around the subject, she was still uncertain whether she was prepared to talk about her own experience. “If I’m still not sure that I’m going to talk about it after fighting three years against that silence, I realised how strong it was.”

Diwan has been heartened, though, by the reactions and the dialogue that the film has prompted, particular from male audience members. “I heard this sentence a lot: ‘I had no idea.’ In France, a man at the end of the screening said: ‘I must tell you something. I was a human rights writer all my life against [the war in] Vietnam, for the political left. I fought for many things. But I just realised that I never fought for women. And that I should have.’”

In UK cinemas from April 22 and US cinemas from May 6

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