100 min | R | May 6, 2022 | IFC Films
France, 1963. Anne is a brilliant literature student who discovers she is pregnant, and abortion is a crime that can land her and anyone who helps her in prison. The film does not flinch, and it does not ask you to either.
Anne Duchesne is a working-class literature student in 1963 France with a future in front of her. She gets pregnant. The pregnancy is a sentence, because abortion is illegal and the law treats it as a crime against the state. Audrey Diwan adapts Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical account into a thriller built around a body and a clock. The film is about the way the law turns a private problem into a solitary one and forces a young woman to risk prison, sterility, and death to keep the life she has earned.
Anamaria Vartolomei carries the film as Anne with a performance built on watchfulness and refusal. She plays a woman who keeps reading the doctors and the friends and the men for the one who might help, and she registers each closed door without spectacle. Kacey Mottet Klein plays Jean, a fellow student who wants Anne while offering her nothing real. Louise Orry-Diquéro and Luàna Bajrami play Brigitte and Hélène, friends who recoil the moment the word abortion enters the room. Sandrine Bonnaire plays Anne’s mother Gabrielle, who runs a café and dreams of a daughter who escapes their class, and Vartolomei lets you see Anne calculating what the truth would cost that dream.
Diwan and co-writer Marcia Romano structure the script around the advancing weeks and put the count on screen. The camera stays close on Anne, in the Academy ratio that boxes her into the frame and keeps the world behind her out of focus. Diwan refuses to cut away from the physical procedures, and she holds the takes until they become unbearable and then holds them longer. The sound design strips the music back so the body’s processes happen in near silence. When the film does show pain, it shows it as labor and not as melodrama.
This is a film that understands that the politics are in the procedure and not in the speech. Diwan never lets Anne deliver a thesis about reproductive rights, because the law itself is the argument and Anne’s narrowing options are the proof. The closeness of the camera makes solidarity impossible to extend and complicity impossible to avoid. Happening puts the audience inside a body that the state has decided it owns. It earns its unflinching gaze by never once using it for shock.