By Christine Hume.
Happening, directed by Audrey Diwan, co-written by Diwan and Marcia Romano, adapted from a book with the same title by Annie Ernaux, 2021 (France) 2022 (USA).
They are smoking and chewing gum and talking about desire in each preceding scene, of which there are four, all saturated in visceral blue: a mood, a reflection, an evocation of sex, the hottest part of a flame. We are piecing it together, one fire at a time. Everything points to an emergency, but Anne, the narrator, is strident in her denial and refusal to acknowledge her own looming catastrophe.
The movie opens with three young women getting ready to go out, sizing each other up in the mirror, laughing, when one says “Don’t burn me with your cigarette.” Cut to the club where the song they dance to implores them, “Kiss me baby, set my soul on fire.” Anne says “They say ‘beware of firefighters,’” to one of the men from the station pretending to be a student presumably in order to get laid. Later, in class, a professor asks about Louis Aragon’s “Elsa at the Mirror.” Here is the opening stanza, not offered in the movie:
It was the middle of our tragedy
And all the long day sitting at her mirror
She combed her bright gold hair
To me it was
As though her calm hands quieted a blaze
It was the middle of our tragic days
Anne tells the professor, “The lovers’ drama evokes a national one.” This is her current tragedy, too. She cannot quiet the blaze of her future burning down before her. Anne tells the professor, the poem’s technique is “anaphora,” which is how we understand the form of the movie.
In the ninth minute, the nth hour, the new scene, Anne lets us know that she is in the middle of her tragedy as she fights against acknowledging to herself that she is pregnant in France, in 1963, twelve years before abortion becomes decriminalized. In the ninth minute, Anne is suddenly alone in her dorm room, wrapped in a blue and white towel, turned away from us, a gesture of resistance to disclosure and spectacle. She sits at a desk, writing in her diary on April 29 (my partner’s birthday!), “Nothing / Still nothing.” This rien is of course growing inside her, the everything that ruins each day thereafter.
In the autobiographical novel that the movie follows, Annie Ernaux shifts between her past and present, amplifying the tension between 1963 and 2000 by rendering her younger self at an emotional remove. The teenager struggles under the coolly contemplative gaze of her older self. In the movie, hindsight is ditched to offer an intensification of the immediate drama, which unfolds as a series of increasingly desperate attempts to end her pregnancy. Anne is defiant and shamed as she asks doctors, friends, professors, students, lovers, and strangers whose phone numbers have been slipped to her for help, but each attempt fails a different way (anaphora). There’s nowhere for Anne to turn in a country where asking for an abortion risks a jail sentence for her and anyone who helps her, where a barbellate atmosphere of church-and-state fueled fear and punishment forces Anne into panicked isolation and life-threatening situations, just as if she lived in contemporary America. (Do you know how much we care about children? Every nine minutes a child is sexually assaulted in America.) But at this moment, in the ninth minute, we peer over Anne’s bare shoulder, curious and enamored of her conviction, intelligence, and independence, and we become complicit in what has just turned into an existential thriller of our time.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
4. Emma Jones
5. Des Barry
6. Lindsay Lerman
7. Joshua Glenn
8. Jessica Sequeiro.
To pitch a submission, contact Nicholas Rombes at nrombesudm@gmail.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christine Hume’s fifth book is a collection of essays, Everything I Never Wanted to Know (Ohio State University Press, 21st Century Essays Series). Her other books include three works of poetry and a lyric portrait of girlhood, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021). Recent prose appears in Harper’s, The Boston Review, Architecture and Culture, Feminist Review, Conjunctions, Disabilities Studies Quarterly, and other venues. With Anna Maria Hong, she co-edited Traversals: A Folio on Walking, published (Summer 2023) in The Hopkins Review. Since 2001, she has been faculty in the Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.
