Direction: Audrey Diwan
Country: France
With this immersive adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s novel L'événement, director/screenwriter and journalist Audrey Diwan plunges us into experiencing societal severity through the eyes of a brilliant Literature college student whose life and rights are impacted when she can’t get an abortion done in safe conditions. This happened in France in 1963, when the termination of pregnancy was considered a crime. The procedure became legal in that country in 1975.
The film strikingly punctuates the realist drama lived by Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei), an unhesitating young woman who realizes she’s not prepared to have a child at that particular moment. Giving birth would absolutely destroy her life and a future career that is bound to be extraordinary. Anguished and lonely, she fights with everything she has. The narrative exposes several difficulties that come her way: having to hide the truth from her hardworking parents, the shame of talking to her friends about the problem, approaching the estranged man who got her pregnant, continuing or not her studies, the doctors’ hypocrisy, the unemotional abortionist, the health and criminal risks.
It’s a visceral experience that, unabashedly, takes the podium for this particular topic, alongside European contemporary classics such as Vera Drake (2004) and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). The unpredictability of the story, together with a sensitive performance by Vartolomei, a Franco-Romanian actor who announces herself as a major name to watch, are prime causes for not letting this one go.
