Review: Happening

Courtesy of IFC Films.

Eerily prescient, skillfully made and often hellish to experience, Audrey Diwan's "Happening" joins a small group of powerful films from recent years - namely, Cristian Mungiu's masterpiece "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and Eliza Hittman's somber "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" - about young women trying to procure abortions. This one is particularly grueling and, horrifyingly, timely.

Adapted from Annie Ernaux's autobiographical novel, the picture follows Annie (Anamaria Vartolomei), a young Frenchwoman in 1963 who is studying literature at a university when she discovers that she is pregnant. She seems to find her predicament impossible, as she only slept with the man whom she'd been seeing off and on once.

Although illegal in France at the time, Annie attempts to enlist help from several local doctors, and she gets nothing but smug indifference, judgmental tsk-tsking and, in one case, a repulsive betrayal in which a practitioner convinces her to take an action that ends up bolstering her pregnancy. The other men with whom she comes into contact - teachers, relatives, the man who impregnated her - aren't much better.

In terms of story, "Happening" doesn't necessarily go anywhere you don't expect it to go. Annie's friends are mostly unwilling to help her, so she undertakes the mission to find a doctor to carry out an abortion on her own. "Accept it," one tells her after he'd given her a hint on how to have a miscarriage, only to see it fail.

This disturbing piece of advice is not only something you'd expect to hear on Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale," but in American society at this moment. Nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade, the possibility of women in specific areas of the United States being forced to cross state lines or have dangerous - for lack of a better phrase - "back alley" abortions is once again a potential reality.

Timing-wise, "Happening" is frighteningly of-the-moment. It's also a tough sit. An actual abortion procedure - of the back alley variety - is seen in unflinching detail, and the aftermath of it is even more horrific. The fact that it is shot in one take makes it all the more harrowing. 

Vartolomei's powerful performance carries the proceedings and really draws us in to Annie's experience, one that would resonate at any moment, but especially the present one. "Happening" is a powerful story about the horrors of the past that, if we're not careful, could become those of the present.