The film begins with young college girls getting ready for a night where there will be guys. Nothing more banal, right? No. Because when Anne discovers that she is pregnant, we also discover that she lives in a world where women are not free. In France. But it could be anywhere.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
Filmmaker Audrey Diwan, who won the Golden Bear at Venice last year for The event – a powerful, unsustainable and necessary film – has taken care not to underline the time in which this story takes place, an adaptation of the famous autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux, published in 2000. It thus erases the distance between today and the early 1960s, when abortion was illegal in France. The shock is all the greater, as is the feeling of injustice and indignation. But we also feel admiration for the director who knew how to perfectly transpose Annie Ernaux’s text, and for this young woman determined not to have her destiny stolen by an unequal and hypocritical society.
I warn you here that I will reveal the ending of the film at the end of this column, although the word “disclosure” seems to me an inappropriate warning when a film about abortion does not end in drama.
I had been waiting for this film for weeks, partly because Annie Ernaux is one of my literary heroines. We do not come out unscathed from reading The eventno more than this film adaptation that made me crown many times.
In a recent interview with Laure Adler at The blue Hour on France Inter, Annie Ernaux repeated once again how much the right to abortion was the great revolution of the XXand century. Nothing could be more true and it must be repeated unceasingly.
This is moreover one of the rare subjects on which I am intractable: I refuse to discuss with anyone who questions this right, because any supposed “nuance” in this regard is a dangerous breach, and we know how many reactionaries and religious people are just waiting for this breach to rush into it. Every generation since the legalization of abortion has endured these repeated assaults, and it is the responsibility of every generation to resist them for a truly egalitarian world.
read and see The event is a good way to remember it. I am happy that the cinema is taking over from a novel which came out in 2000 with indifference, because we found it anachronistic since abortion was legal, whereas what it tells is so important.
In the film, we won’t be shown how Anne got pregnant, and that’s a good choice. It doesn’t matter, it’s none of our business, the “how”. All that matters is Anne’s choice for herself – wonderfully played by Anamaria Vartolomei. Anne comes from a modest family, like her alter ego Annie Ernaux, who has often spoken of the reality of social defectors. Her only chance for a better life is education, she is encouraged by her parents who love her and are proud of her. To be pregnant out of wedlock in the early 1960s was a condemnation, approved by customs and all levels of society. Because obviously, the girls of the rich families had the right to a safe abortion, with good contacts, when the family wanted to avoid shame, while the girls of the people had to undergo the humiliation of having “sinned”.
Anne is not presented as a victim of her choices, but a victim of the written and unwritten laws of society, in the eyes of everyone she meets.
Abortion is illegal, and if you get pregnant and comply with the law, your life, your hopes and your ambitions are ruined, because you will be forced, judged and downgraded. All this for having fucked with a man who will not suffer the same consequences.
Anne is faced with doctors, all male, who are terrified of helping her – it could cost them their careers – or activists who do not care about her life and lie to her by prescribing a drug supposed to cause abortion, but which actually reinforces the pregnancy. Help can only come from those who have been through the same thing, from men who know how to be allies, and from those “angel makers”, as they were called, often poor women who had seen others and understood what was really at stake.
Abortion, under these conditions, is terrible. It is not the abortion that is, but the conditions, it must be remembered.
Anne’s determination, who never once doubted her choice, made us want her to succeed. What she will have to go through is terrible, and could have cost her her life. And even something beyond his life, because if you arrived at the hospital on the verge of death for having tried to abort on your own, the doctor still had this power to say the words “miscarriage”, which freed you, or “abortion”, which earned you prison, if you survived.
At the end, during her exams, Anne, having survived, takes her pencil to analyze the heroic verses of Victor Hugo. I thought of Annie Ernaux, who was right to go all the way, even more to write her truth in a novel, because from her choice was born a writer and an essential work for the freedom of women, and gender equality.
The event by Audrey Diwan hits theaters on Friday.