Happening

Audrey Diwan's Happening (L'Événement) won the Golden Lion at Venice 2021, the largest prize for a French-language film at the festival in recent memory. The film consolidated Diwan, after her earlier Losing It (2019), as one of the most distinctive contemporary French directors of her generation. Adapted from Annie Ernaux's 2000 autobiographical book of the same name (Ernaux, who would win the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, had based the book on her own experience) the film is part of the broader French autobiographical-cinema tradition that Ernaux's writing has helped to consolidate.

1963 France. Anne Duchesne (Anamaria Vartolomei, in a star-launching central performance), a gifted French literature student from a working-class background at a provincial university, discovers she is pregnant, at a time when abortion was criminally prohibited in France, with severe penalties for both the woman and the practitioner, and would not be legalised until 1975. The film follows her sustained, secret search across the weeks that follow for a way to obtain the abortion that her academic future depends on, against the active disapprobation of her university friends, her family, and the medical establishment of the period.

The film operates in a sustained register of procedural realism, the constant cinematic-language commitment to Anne's solitary perspective, the long static frames, the absence of non-diegetic music. Vartolomei's central performance is among the most-committed lead performances in 2020s European cinema. The film's release (in the months before the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision) gave it an additional contemporary political-historical resonance that the Venice jury had partly anticipated.