DYou don’t want to encounter this film in the dark. You want to take it outside, in the sun, because otherwise you can hardly stand it. And then you want to change its format, tearing at its edges to the right and left, so that the woman he follows constantly for two hours on an incredibly sober way of the cross, whom he crates into the old 4:3 format, has freedom and scope.
But all that would be treason. It’s about the dark, it’s about the prison that women were thrown into, into which they are now being thrown again in more and more countries around the world, if they want to have an abortion. If they don’t want to lose their lives from the disease “from which only women suffer and which makes them housewives”.
That’s what the French writer Annie Ernaux wrote. An ethnologist of herself and of French society as reflected in her highly reflective, autofictional storytelling. In 1964, Ernaux became pregnant and had an abortion. Anne Duchesne was her name back then, she was a literature student and the first in her family to go to university.
For almost forty years she had carried the trauma with her, she had struggled to find words, a language. In 2001 “The Event” was published, a tremendous, tremendously concise story, the genesis of which is also due to Ernaux’s experience that the liberal societies of the West had forgotten that pregnancy for unmarried women was still the end of the world in the 1960s and what liberation hard-won abortion rights actually brought.
Last year (a year after “Das Event” finally appeared in German two decades late) the film into which Audrey Diwan turned the book received the Golden Lion in Venice. In the darkness of the cinema, a woman is said to have fainted, and several are said to have left the screening. Nothing is known of anyone tampering with the screen or the format.
The fact that what you see in the film, no matter how terrible and consistent it is, doesn’t come close to showing the horror of what you read in Ernaux is small consolation. The horror that one feels in the film is different, the result of the masterful translation of Ernaux’s literature into the language of the film.
In a desperate situation: Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) with her mother (Sandrine Bonnaire)
Source: © 2021 PROKINO Film distribution GmbH
Diwan left out the self-reflective passages in which Ernaux reflects on autofictional writing, reflecting herself as a woman who has finally grown up and a long-established writer, in the encounter with herself as a young girl suddenly at the mercy of male oppressive medicine. Otherwise, it has not deviated one iota from Ernaux’s goal.
Because that would have been a betrayal of history. “If I do not relate this experience in detail,” Ernaux wrote, “I contribute to obscuring the reality of women’s lives and make myself an accomplice to male domination of the world.”
In her film about Anne, Audrey Diwan turned the writing about herself into a kind of double historical research method. The stages of this passion story are the weeks of pregnancy. Weeks in which life, which is successful against all social conditions, threatens to rush into the abyss.
Anne Duchesne is not a victim
In which Anne’s world gets cracks, consists only of cracks. In which Anne becomes more and more lonely, more and more radical, but also with herself, the women, the world around her. In which she is betrayed, at best abandoned, by male medicine. This Anne Duchesne is no victim. What she wants to do, what she has to do, is clear from the start. She pursues her goal all the way to the table of an angel maker (who actually existed until the 1970s).
She only realizes that the “disease” not only made her a housewife, but could kill her, after she abused herself with red-hot knitting needles and was “treated” twice by the angel maker. You can’t see the blood, nor the horror, which Ernaux described in her shocking frankness.
The camera is the pen with which Audrey Diwan wrote this Way of the Cross. Laurent Tangy guided them. Sometimes the images grow out of the blur. They are always very close to Anamaria Vartolomei. On her vulnerable neck, her open face, her eyes, which can get incredibly big. She shows nudity without exhibiting it where it needs to be, because it’s getting too bad, she stays aloof, looking at what’s triggered in their faces by what’s happening but not shown.
Tangy’s images and the movements of Anamaria Vartolomei, which cannot be praised enough, have the same rhythm. you are one “The Event” is – that’s what makes the horror so palpable – an incredibly physical film. To which all trades actually contribute. The light that can be merciless and secretive. The sound track – rarely has the breathing, the buzzing of the flies, the blowing of the wind been so much a part of a film, a drama. The music – after what feels like an eternity, it starts and it sounds like a broken string.
“The event” will not make anti-abortionists think. Everyone else does. They are a reminder of what is ready to be sacrificed by anyone who accepts that – as is currently the case in Poland, for example – the free present is being transformed back into a mercilessly male-run prison. And thus helping to destroy the lives of women like almost that of Annie Ernaux.