Republic of excellence or reign of terror? Images of France in Audrey Diwan’s “Happening” (l‘Événement)

Audrey Diwan’s “Happening” (in French, “l’Événement,” or “the event”) was the opening night film in this year’s New Directors/New Films series in New York, co-produced annually by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, and will be opening in theaters later this year. The film will get some attention for the social/political issue it focuses on, but it not only does so in an unusual piquant way, it also does so in a way that thematizes something that in a French context perhaps even more interesting.

The atmosphere of the life of the main character, Anne (Annamaria Vartolemei), could be described as one of a reign of terror. France in the early 60s as a reign of terror? I refer not to the right-wing terrorism of the OAS, an organization opposing Algerian independence that carried out bombings in 1961-62 that claimed more than 2,000 deaths, and whose slogan was “France is and will remain French.” Notwithstanding perennial right-wing candidate Marine le Pen’s association with this idea and this legacy, the film presents a problem that is both more personal and more totalizing.

Everywhere Anne goes, when she mentions to people - doctors, family, friends, people at school - that she is pregnant and prefers to terminate that status so that, a senior in high school, she can continue with her life, and pursue her ambition - which eventually will be to become a writer - by going to university — they all inform her, often without naming the thing itself, that this is simply not said, let alone done. Anne is condemned by force of unhappy circumstance to live in a reign of terror, and that place is 1963 France.

But there is another side to this place and time, one that the director nails with great care, as much as any film, and there are some very good ones, giving us a sense of that time. The other side of Anne’s world is represented here most compellingly by her high school classroom. The French educational system is both famously and notorious rigorous, and that can be both enabling and disabling, encouraging or just harsh. This is also France before 1968, when the student protests of that year did have among their motivating targets both explicitly and perhaps even more implicitly the demanding character of the school and university system (which in France is a single system, public, focused on essay exams that require careful thought, and serious confronting of oneself by way of the classics; this system is the principal means of social advancement even more in France than America, because the business and government elite are mostly selected from their success in that system). It must be said that the sense or feeling and the meaning and uses of a demanding formal education in this system is a potential object of an ambiguous regard.

What this means in part is that Anne faces a set of permissive and (more obviously) prohibitive demands that for her, and the viewer, can lead in more than one direction. The film’s ending, which may be a surprise (I will not give it away) owes its tenor to Anne’s ability to make a choice within this given framework. But throughout the film, as she with unrelenting earnestness and real danger (here too one easily thinks of more “politically political” causes - before feminism declared that “the personal” also is a site of political struggle) tries to get out of her predicament, my feeling was one of the claustrophobic tension of living in a society whose everyday fabric of life is marked by the terror that aims to prevent certain things from being done or thought and said. And that of course makes it appropriate, in this film adapted from a novel, that she will pass through the portal of her school exams in order to become a writer.

Today, in 2022, various political and social philosophers and other observers have reminded us, as the often horrible real experience of politics and our contemporary neoliberal capitalist police states, from Russia to America, make all too painfully clear, we seem to be living in times when the specter of authoritarian or repressively totalitarian governance seems all too close, in possibility or in the actual state of things. This film succeeds in evoking, in the more solid recollection of a recent past, something of what that is and feels like, in what may be the only truly effective means of allegory. Then, as now too in America (not in France), prohibitive laws on abortion are the target or pretext of clampdown social life. Many women have had to cancel their professional life ambitions, as Anne fears, or risk dangerous illegal procedures as she does, and when certain social dangers threaten, one of the things we do through literature and narrative film is remember.