L’event, by the French Audrey Diwan, shows the atrocious way of the cross of Anne, a student on flight towards a brilliant future, eager to terminate her pregnancy against the advice of doctors and with the help of an angel maker or of herself. Because you need what you need in the France of 1960 as much as with us. Almost 35 years later A case of women, by Claude Chabrol — then delivered from the point of view of the abortionist (Isabelle Huppert) — the collective desire to control the female body (still alive) comes back to haunt us.
At the last Venice Film Festival, the coveted Golden Lion crowned this powerfully intimate social work. Adapted from the autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux published in 2000, evoking the era of the criminalization of abortion in France, this film is accompanied by images of implacable naturalism.
In a virtual meeting in Paris, the filmmaker blessed her laurel: “The Golden Lion has multiplied in a crazy way the possibility of showing around the world a film which addresses sexual freedom and which will not have been easy to finance. »
Audrey Diwan worked closely with Annie Ernaux at each stage of the script. “This novelist whom I admire puts words without detour on her truth. She is able to talk about sex without necessarily linking it to love. I adapted a piece of his life by seeking to reach the truth of his memories and to make a gesture in the extension of his. We talked a lot between us about the fear that innervates the story because of the socio-political context of the time. In the novel, the unbearable difference between an institutional abortion and a clandestine abortion was woven of chance. The film creates more causal links through suspense with which the viewer identifies.
“Is someone going to report you? Are you going to die or make it out? I was trying to give and make the spectator feel the days that pass and the belly that rounds. »
She chose to focus on the body, not the speech. “Impossible to embrace this text while looking away out of modesty. How did this young girl look at herself? wondered the filmmaker.
Abortion, like the previous painful stages, Audrey Diwan wanted to film them as close as possible to Anamaria Vartolomei. This Franco-Romanian actress, discovered in My Little Princess, by Eva Ionesco, seemed both mysterious and magnetic to her. “I was looking for a very young performer capable of playing in a minimalist register with a camera glued to her gestures. If she had played bigger, it would have been unbearable. Anamaria had it all. After meeting her, I didn’t want to audition any others. »
By filming to tighten the frame in 1.37 format, hand-held camera, its director of photography, Laurent Tanguy, was able to place the young performer at the center of the action, embracing her movements. Sequence shots also allowed almost unbearable scenes to come to the end of their breath.
“The enormous challenge of the film was to remain in the correctness of things by pushing the story on the side of the carnal experience, continues Audrey Diwan. I have experienced personal issues and I also rely on my memory. The knitting needle, it had to be shown. The course of the objects translates those of the character. »
The filmmaker claims to Rosetta,of the Dardenne brothers, of No shelter, no law, by Agnes Varda. “A character that one begins to envy for being free even to die. Sandrine Bonnaire, interpreter in 1985 of this moving film, this time plays Anne’s mother.
Audrey Diwan claims to work at the crossroads of the intimate and the political. And to recall to what extent the 1960s saw the youth constitute themselves as a social body, by acquiring sexual freedoms, nevertheless based on prohibitions. Same story today, when young girls are victims of blackmail at the sextape. But in The event, she did not seek to oppose the sexes by disproportionately burdening men, in order to remain in the simple reflection of an era. “At first, the boy next to Anne wants nothing to do with this abortion, then changes his point of view along the way. »
Audrey Diwan had not studied cinema. “My learning is empirical,” she emphasizes. I did it while watching movie videos. She was initially a screenwriter, writer and editor, and her first feature, the family drama But you are crazy, in 2019, already dealt with nagging social issues. “This first film gave me the freedom to do things differently, by radicalizing the form. In this artistic universe, the learning path requires time, but freedom is gained. »
The event will hit theaters on February 18.