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<\/p>\nBy Christine Hume.<\/p>\n
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Happening<\/em>, 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).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The movie opens with three young women getting ready to go out, sizing each other up in the mirror, laughing, when one says \u201cDon\u2019t burn me with your cigarette.\u201d Cut to the club where the song they dance to implores them, \u201cKiss me baby, set my soul on fire.\u201d Anne says \u201cThey say \u2018beware of firefighters,\u2019\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cElsa at the Mirror.\u201d Here is the opening stanza, not offered in the movie:<\/p>\n It was the middle of our tragedy Anne tells the professor, \u201cThe lovers\u2019 drama evokes a national one.\u201d This is her current tragedy, too. She cannot quiet the blaze of her future burning down before her. Anne tells the professor, the poem\u2019s technique is \u201canaphora,\u201d which is how we understand the form of the movie.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s birthday!), \u201cNothing \/ Still nothing.\u201d This rien<\/em> is of course growing inside her, the everything that ruins each day thereafter.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Previous essays in the Minute 9<\/strong> series curated by Nicholas Rombes<\/strong>: To pitch a submission, contact Nicholas Rombes at nrombesudm@gmail.com<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nAnd all the long day sitting at her mirror
\nShe combed her bright gold hair
\nTo me it was
\nAs though her calm hands quieted a blaze
\nIt was the middle of our tragic days<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Happening-Christine-Hume-1024x739.png\")
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\n1. Nicholas Rombes<\/a>
\n2. Alex Zamalin<\/a>
\n3. Grant Maierhofer<\/a>
\n4. Emma Jones<\/a>
\n5. Des Barry<\/a>
\n6. Lindsay Lerman<\/a>
\n7. Joshua Glenn<\/a>
\n8. Jessica Sequeiro<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/Christine-Hume-pic.jpg\")
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