“I’m pregnant. And I want to continue studying », the protagonist of ‘The event’ lets go of her gynecologist. We are in provincial France in 1963. Abortion is a crime that lands those who practice it and the women who submit to it to jail (the Veil law would not decriminalize it until 1975, three years after the methods became legal). contraceptives). Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) knows that having a child is the same as becoming a single mother and housewife. The unwanted baby of hers would put an end to a professional independence. And even though her freedom and her life are at stake, she is willing to end her pregnancy at any cost.
Winner of the Golden Lion at the last Venice Festival, the second feature film by Audrey Diwan that hits Spanish theaters this weekend is based on the autobiographical novel by French writer Annie Ernaux, published a couple of years ago in our country by Tusquets. In 1963, when Ernaux was studying Philology in Rouen, she discovered that she was pregnant. From the first moment, she did not have the slightest doubt that she did not want to have that creature. Diwan follows the gestation process of the protagonist until she undergoes a clandestine abortion. Cinema has never shown such an intervention with such crudeness and verismo.
‘The event’ starts in the residence hall where the protagonist and her two classmates adjust their bras to increase their chests and shorten their skirts before going out to a party. Anne is a brilliant and diligent student, perfectly aware that the university that her parents pay for with effort is the only way out to escape the bar they run. She hasn’t had her period come down for several weeks. So the encounter she had with a guy from another college may have unintended consequences. There is no guilt complex in a woman who wants to enjoy her sexuality, but urgency first and terror later.
Audrey Diwan’s camera is at all times glued to the protagonist, who continually washes her face and looks at herself in the mirror, as if she wanted to sweep an impurity from her body. More than a drama, ‘The Event’ works as a suspense thriller and even a horror film. Added to the stress of hiding her pregnancy is the risk of committing something forbidden. Rich French girls of the time could safely go to Holland to have an abortion, in the same way that Spanish women traveled to London. This is a very harsh, chilling film, with terrible images, such as Anne’s attempted abortion by inserting a knitting needle into her vagina or the final scenes, never seen in a fictional film.
“Audrey Diwan had the courage to show abortion in all its brutal reality: knitting needles, a probe inserted into the uterus by an abortionist…”, praises the writer Annie Ernaux. “These disturbing images make us understand the horrors that were perpetrated on women’s bodies and what a step back would mean.” For her part, Audrey Diwan was impressed by Ernaux’s book “the dichotomy between the hackneyed formula: clandestine abortion and the concrete reality of the procedure.” «The first thing I thought about was the body of that young woman, what she must have suffered since she found out that she was pregnant. And the dilemma she faced: risk her life and have an abortion, or have the baby and sacrifice her future. Body or mind. I wouldn’t have liked to have to choose.”
‘The event’ brings us closer to a woman who is observed, persecuted and judged in a class-based universe. And she makes us empathize with her absolute loneliness, since she does not find support in men, in her companions or in her family. “Abortion is not the only theme in the film,” agrees the director. “My protagonist is a social renegade. She comes from a working class family and she is the first to go to college. The college environment is more bourgeois, with stricter codes and morals. Anne goes from one world to the other while she keeps a secret that could end all her hopes ».
Several spectators at the last Seminci in Valladolid were absent during the screening of ‘The event’ and a woman had to be treated when she got dizzy at the climax of the film. «I did not want to provoke. But it seemed essential to me not to look away in those moments, “says Audrey Diwan. “Above all, I wanted to shoot from start to finish, without cuts. I refused to film theoretical sequences that explain what the protagonist is going through, without experiencing it ourselves.
Nothing is superfluous or lacking in a tape shot in a square screen format, in order to isolate the claustrophobic microcosm of the protagonist. One would have to refer to the Romanian Christian Mungiu and his masterpiece ‘4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days’ to find such a shocking story, although in this case the word “abortion” is not said at any time in the footage. The political dimension of this distressing feature film is clear at a time when in some places, such as the states of Texas and Idaho, the right to terminate a pregnancy is once again being pilloried. Annie Ernaux writes in ‘The event’: «Although I knew from the Ogino calendar that I was in a period of risk, I did not believe that ‘it could take root’ inside my womb. In everything related to love and enjoyment, it did not seem to me that my body was intrinsically different from that of men.
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