Annie Ernaux’s memoir of her 1963 abortion, Happening, originally published in 2000, and Audrey Diwan’s 2021 movie adaptation of the same name are the subject of our latest edition of Asymptote at the Movies. Ernaux’s memoir tells the story of an abortion she sought before the procedure was legal in France, and the story of her reflecting on the experience decades later, well after France legalized abortion. Diwan’s movie came out in a very different world than the one Ernaux’s memoir reflects on and, indeed, the one in which Ernaux wrote her memoir. Both the book and the movie follow young Annie’s struggle to find the medical care she needs—Ernaux said that watching the film “plunged” her back into the experience she wrote about. Taking the two together underscores the urgency of her situation and raises questions about the difference between cinematic immediacy and memoiristic distance. In the following roundtable, Meghan Racklin, Xiao Yue Shan, and Georgina Fooks discuss the relationship between these two works, the translation of memoir into fiction, and experience of reading and watching the movement of time.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Halfway through the pages of Ernaux’s Happening, there’s a line that I saw as a kind of summation of her entire corpus’ ethos: “I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled.” It seems to me that a similar sentiment across nearly all of her texts—which are, after all, in their obsessive tunnelling and metaphysical depth, a refusal of any verdict that women’s lives are mundane, and their thoughts unserious.
And there is a particular impact to that Serious Verb—chronicled. In French, Ernaux opts for the less indomitable l’écrire, but I’d like to believe that Tanya Leslie, in her translation, understood that to write would have been too pliant for what Ernaux wanted to say: that such experiences needed to be inscribed into the archives of human history, that they needed to be preserved as well as they can for future excavation, and that such texts would fill the void in the scaffolding of time.
Happening, then, is a text about writing, but also the remembering that feeds the writing, and also the rupture that must be navigated when reality and recognition are trying to find one another on the page. If there was any image that came to mind while I read Happening, it was only of the older Ernaux holding a pen, gazing out the window, closing her eyes in conjuration of an image. Because Happening does not centralise the abortion that propels its narrative, but the intellectual clarity that is required to unveil “what can be found there,” I almost expected a cinematic replication of that once-removed perspective in Audrey Diwan’s adaptation: voiceover narration, analepsis/prolepsis, superimpositions . . .
The film, however, makes no use of such manipulations, and completely isolates itself within the parameters of the Event; it is a movie about abortion, and its illegality and ramifications in 1960s France. It is so dissonant from its source text—not in content but in intention—that it jarred me when Anamaria Varolomei, who plays Ernaux, is first addressed as Annie. It was impossible for me to connect her with the woman of the book—not only because the woman is older, but because the woman is remembering, not living through. The film is an intimate, occasionally chilling, and politically effective film about the alienation and humiliation of being accidentally pregnant in that era—and as such it is rooted in the immediate, in the physical, and in the cinematic present. Ernaux’s text read to me in direct opposition, weaving and defining that tenuous space of the eternal past. How did the two of you feel about this variation in treatment? Was it as disconcerting for you?
Meghan Racklin (MR): I had a very similar reaction, Xiao Yue! I appreciate the film’s depiction of abortion—it felt honest in a way that little else is on the subject. It takes that from its source material, which is unflinching and unsparing about the details of Ernaux’s abortion, but because of the visual nature of film (and in part, perhaps, because the film is not told from the same reflective standpoint as the book) it feels more visceral and immediate in the movie. In many ways I think what you’re pointing to, Xiao Yue, is the inevitable gap between a work in one medium and the same work translated into another. And while the film largely neglected the ideas about writing and reflection that are so central to Ernaux’s book, the timing (at least, for viewers who, like me, are based in the U.S.) of the movie’s making gives it something of the quality of being about both the present and the past that Ernaux’s book has—while the movie is set in the 1960s, it doesn’t dwell on period details, and so, with the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade, it felt in some ways like a movie about the past and the present (or a potential near future).
In addition (and, I think, related) to what you’re highlighting, Xiao Yue, about Ernaux’s emphasis on the process of remembering and writing, one of my favorite things about her book is the way she depicts the experience of time as fundamentally embodied. After learning of her pregnancy, she writes that “[t]ime ceased to be a series of meaningless days punctuated by university talks and lectures, afternoons spent in cafés and at the library, leading up to exams and the summer vacation, to the future. It became a shapeless entity growing inside me which had to be destroyed at all costs.” I love that idea of time as something in the body—it’s an idea that directly connects the time of experience to the time of writing, for Ernaux, too. In explaining why she wants to write this story, she writes, “[t]his investigation must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” Anamaria Vartolomei does a remarkable job depicting the surface calm and underlying anxiety, and I think the way the film uses time is interesting: counting the weeks of her pregnancy throughout gives the movie clear stakes. But that felt fairly different, to me, from Ernaux’s sense of time in the book, where she notes that “At times I would actually forget that I was two months’ pregnant . . . . If I let time have its way, by next July they’ll be pulling a child out of me. But I can’t feel it at all.” For her, time expands and contracts in the body; in the movie, pregnancy is all forward motion.
Georgina Fooks (GF): I agree fully with both of you that the film startled me in its adaptation—reading Happening, I was overcome by its textuality and its self-consciousness about being a text, a written record, an account—an accounting with the past and its impact on the future. I find that Ernaux’s writing is not just about women’s lives, but the everyday act of writing turned radical by representing these lives, of making them literature. In making a film about abortion, I suppose Diwan is translating this act of representation into the cinematic plane—rather than making literature of these experiences, she’s making cinema out of them, where again the act of representation in this medium is politically charged. While reading, I thought ahead to the film, and was curious to see how the viscerality of the imagery would play out on screen. I think this is the first time I’d ever seen a filmic representation of an abortion, but I felt Ernaux’s visual depictions would have made for even more squeamish cinema. She offers up so many images that feel cinematic in the mind, but perhaps would feel like gore on the screen—like the image of the beginning of her abortion “gradually giving way to another one, dated nine years earlier. The large pinkish stain of blood and other bodily fluids left in the middle of my pillow by our cat.”
In contrast to your image of the older Ernaux writing, Xiao Yue, I found myself experiencing a rush of images while reading. I could see the Rouen of the 60s, the Rouen of today. The passages I highlighted for myself are extremely visual, from when the young Annie feels the urge to draw the vertiginous street corner where she had her abortion—the “only time in my adult life when I have felt like drawing”—and this part particularly moved me: “My inability to use different words and this definitive coupling of past events with specific images barring all others are no doubt proof that I truly experienced such events in this particular manner.” I love Leslie’s choice of “coupling,” this intimate mingling of language and image. And the image feels important, as the intermediary between language and the unspeakable reality of the body and its pain during the abortion. To see the pain is then to start to describe it, to put language to it.
But how does the visual operate in cinema, as opposed to literature? I think it comes back to what you were saying, Meghan, about time. Poet-philosopher Denise Riley writes on the relation of grief and time in Time Lived Without Its Flow, where a limit experience—in her case, the death of her adult child—causes a person to stop experiencing time in its normal flow, to exist in atemporality, without a viable future. It disrupts the normal flow of time. And Ernaux breaks the flow of time in her prose, in this collision of visceral past and reflective present. And as readers, we can flit back and forth alongside her. But cinema here seems to demand the relentless flow of time, a conventional narrative—even if, as Riley notes, “your very condition militates against narrative.” Interestingly, Riley has cinema as the medium that could be capable of depicting this flowless time, through the camerawork.
XYS: I definitely agree with both of you that the medium itself is at the forefront of both these works, but I also think that Diwan had a very precise vision in mind for what she wanted the film to accomplish—beyond cinema’s materiality. As you pointed out, Meghan, the way that time is portrayed in the film—”all forward motion”—gives it a sense of urgency, a covert panic that the viewer then subsumes into every scene. We are always with Annie as she is gradually pulled away from the rhythms of her life, deeper into this all-consuming biological rhythm. This technique of keeping us so close to her incites empathy, which is essential to the idea that in film, the audience needs to feel the stakes; identification with the protagonist is an element so much more integral to cinema than it is to writing. In writing, we do not need to inhabit another’s experiences in order to understand. The greatest prosaists conjure up worlds—but they are built out of only what we already have in our own minds, and the greatest memoirists pass on their personal experiences as ever-extending ideas, as truths.
In an interview, Audrey Diwan mentioned that what had brought her to Ernaux’s book was that she herself had an abortion, and had found that where her abortion was methodical, medical, and contained within the efficacy of routine, Ernaux’s illegal abortion was dominated by its utter randomness. And both works put a lot of emphasis on this aspect of contingency. Ernaux talks about waiting every day for a woman who might never show up, and ruminates on what became of all these incidental individuals who played such a pivotal role in her life. Diwan keeps up a mysterious, thriller-like pace, never giving any indication as to where the next scene will take place. Both of these works make significant political statements in emphasising that horror of being robbed of control, and it’s really interesting how Ernaux and Diwan portrayed that in their own ways.
What Expressionism gave cinema is that emotion can be used as an organisational apparatus, upon which every aspect of the scene can be controlled—colouring, angles, music, lighting. Though Happening is not an expressionist film, it is dramatic and intimate and centred around an experience, and thus it is imperative that we feel the protagonist’s dread, shame, anguish—otherwise we would not be compelled to watch her. It seemed to me that much of Laurent Tangy’s cinematography served to assign the viewer to that personal reality. The camera never strays far from Vartolomei. Tangy favours the over-the-shoulder shot, so that we feel her closeness, but we are also in the line of fire when she faces the admonishing professor, the careless lover, the abortionist between her legs. And when we are not looking at what she is looking at, we are looking at her. We are drawn almost into her.
It brings up a fascinating distinction between literature and cinema and the way they each relate to memory; where I consider textual works to be contributions towards a public consciousness, cinema is actively producing and memorialising cultural memory. Which is to say, where the memoir elucidates, the film captures. It does not preserve an idea, but the world in which that idea existed—as what you brought up, Georgina, about cinema’s capacities to cordon off a “flowless time.” Whereas Ernaux uses her experience to reflect on the mythology of self, the elasticity of time, and nature’s “inexorable course” as it makes its way through a woman’s body (and considering she had written already about her abortion in Cleaned Out, Happening is also a testament to her scepticism of writing’s authority), Diwan’s film exemplifies what Alison Landsberg calls “prosthetic memory,” where through the act of viewing, one can adopt memories that they do not originally possess. An intensive incorporation of these foreign memories into one’s own consciousness has the potential to change one’s entire outlook; it can inform future interpretations of events, or it can alter one’s politics. In Happening, Diwan stitches Ernaux’s experience into the viewer’s—so fascinating, considering how that relates to Happening as autobiographical.
MR: That’s really interesting, Xiao Yue—the shift between the book, with Ernaux’s reflection on her own experience, to the film, which puts the viewer alongside Annie as she experiences the things we see. That also points to a way in which the film is able to do something Ernaux can’t do in her books. She’s a memoirist and as a result, the reader knows something about the end of the book as soon as they see her name on the cover: she lives. She also gestures to her ultimate ability to obtain an abortion from early in the book. Ernaux isn’t especially interested in telling a suspenseful story, but it’s also something she’s more or less prevented from doing by virtue of the form she’s chosen. Film presents other opportunities; the more we discuss, the more I realize that I like that the movie is doing something different than the book. They are each taking advantage of the possibilities of their form, to really compelling effects—both artistically and politically. It’s interesting to think about how they achieve those effects through different methods.
You brought up the scenes in which the abortion itself is depicted, Georgina. I think those are some of the most interesting scenes—the translation from book to film is particularly interesting there. I’m not sure I agree that the descriptions in the book were more intense than the depiction on screen; I think it might be more that reading the book prepares you for the onscreen images. I have a friend who hadn’t read the book when she saw the movie; she saw it in a theatre and the depiction of the abortion made her so queasy she had to leave the theatre. I really appreciated that the film showed the abortion, and Annie in the bathroom with the products of conception—that felt like something new, visually and cinematically. I’ve seen a number of movies and TV shows where abortion is a plot point—Dirty Dancing comes immediately to mind and Abortion On Screen is a great resource (though limited to American TV and film)—but they tend to cut away from the abortion itself. The camera tends to leave the patient in the waiting room or on the table. The film struck a remarkable balance, supporting Annie’s choices and empathizing with her struggle (an attitude that came across primarily in the close, tender camerawork you point to, Xiao Yue) and being totally unafraid to depict abortion directly. I think a lot of films that ostensibly center on the importance of abortion access have struggled to do both—to be both empathetic and unapologetic about abortion. In a way, I think Ernaux’s ability to reflect so unflinchingly on her own experience provided the film with the framework and the detail it needed to create something that felt so immediate.
GF: I keep returning to the question of memory, and how it translates into different media. The book and film are dealing with very different kinds of memory. As you say, Meghan, the book feels very immediate—we’re wrapped up in personal memory, the sort of self-reflection that inspires autobiography. In contrast, while the film retains that immediacy and intimacy in some respects (such as Tangy’s camerawork, hovering at Annie’s shoulder), it enters into the realm of cultural memory: the subtle temporal markings that send us back to the 60s, the salient reflections on abortion that feel pressing today. I agree, Xiao Yue, that cinema feels like it has the power to produce cultural memory—the viscerality of the visual works in its favour. I suppose the translation we’re looking at is not just between page and screen, but from autobiography to fictionalised biography. Diwan alters certain details of Ernaux’s written account to enhance their cinematic and cultural potency – by moving from winter in the book to summer on screen, for example, you get the haste of the end of the school year, a trope more commonly associated with coming-of-age films.
This shift away from autobiography alters the focalisation of the works, and changes our position as cultural consumers. I went back to the words of the Swedish Academy when they awarded Ernaux the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, and found some pertinent truths: “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” The choice of “personal memory,” and its apparent struggle with “collective restraints,” highlights some of the tensions we’ve all encountered in this translation from book to film. Ernaux trades in personal memory, believing that the writing of personal memory can lead it to grow and expand beyond herself, into the universal; as she writes at the end of the book, “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.” But at the same time, she is skeptical of writing’s authority: “these material traces may be more apt to convey reality than the subjective approach provided by memory or writing.” And while Ernaux is clearly deeply interested in the subjectivities of writing, the other lives that writing can lead on the page, I wonder what she would—or does—make of the film adaptation, and perhaps cinema’s stronger ability to “convey reality.”
XYS: With the actual scene of the abortion, I can definitely see your point, Meghan, that the images we form ourselves on the page prepare us for what is on screen—the latter is no less visceral, but because Ernaux writes in such a deceptively simple, almost tranquil language that draws you in, and because you can intimate at all the things she is not saying, it almost feels more violent than what is being shown on screen. Partly because we imagine that violence, that rupture—and as such we have to enact it.
I’m glad you brought up the idea of autobiography versus fictionalised biography, Georgina. In the same interview I brought up before, Diwan actually mentioned that when she screened the film for Ernaux, the author herself was quite affected by it, and told Diwan that—yes, that’s exactly how it was. I was very moved by that anecdote, and it gave me a different handle by which to grasp the film. There’s some sort of discomfiture at the idea of adapting memory, isn’t there? The dysmorphia of memory’s exteriorisation: to see a you that is not you, walking where you do not remember walking, talking with people you don’t remember talking to. It astounded me that Ernaux was able to place herself, somehow back into a place where she never was. I’d like to think that she didn’t necessarily mean that her experience was perfectly replicated, but that her experience does not belong to her alone; it belongs to a long line of womanhood, alienation, helplessness, and carving your freedom out from nothing. One of the most powerful elements in the book was when Ernaux talks about all these individuals who had helped—by aiding her in her abortion—give birth to her new self. Perhaps when she watched Vartolomei on screen, she had the sense that she too had helped another woman give birth to a new self.
Something else I wanted to discuss was the communicability of dialogue verses confession. Because we are not able to actually access any of Vartolomei-as-Annie’s thoughts, the only glimpses we get at her are through the snippets of conversation she has with others. That, and her subtle, silent expressiveness. Additionally, in the film, many of these dialogues are ones of distinct power relations; with men who want to pursue her, with peers who judge her, with friends who don’t want to know of what they don’t approve of, with parents who know her as only a daughter. As such, we are afforded very small windows in which to understand Annie’s emotional landscape, ideas and interpretations, or internal logic—something that is definitive of the written memoir. Of course, it’s impossible to film the act of thinking (it’s impossible even to write the act of thinking), and I wouldn’t have taken note of this had Annie not said in the culminating scene of the film: “I want to write”—when before she had shown no such inclination. I wonder what you thought of the film’s use of its script. Were there any scenes where you felt like you accessed the character’s mind? Did either of you find moments where thinking was happening on-screen?
MR: I’m really interested in this idea of the translation from autobiography to fiction, this idea of adapting memory. There is some discomfort in that, but I think Ernaux’s approach to her own memory lessens the discomfort we might feel. She’s so aware, in her writing, that her own memories are already an adaptation of what happened; remembering is always a translation of the past, not the past itself. I think it’s that awareness that allows her to make something out of her own memories that feels universal, and perhaps that’s also what allows her to see herself in the film, despite its differences from the book. Close to the end of the book, she writes “In my student bathroom, I had given birth to both life and death. For the first time I felt caught up in a line of women, future generations would pass through us.” I think we can see the film and book as two links in that longer chain, two different versions of the same story of, as Ernaux puts it, “an extreme human experience, bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics and taboo—an experience that sweeps through the body.”
That’s also where I think you can see Vartolomei’s Anne thinking—it’s not in what she says so much as in how you see the extremity of the situation making itself felt to her. The scene when she’s in her dorm room, pacing; the scene when she’s quiet and contemplative while her friends look at boys; the scene when she decides to go home with the man from the bar. In those scenes, I can feel the way her situation is preoccupying her and separating her from what she might otherwise be thinking about, or the way she’s trying to forget. It’s thinking in a different way than depicted in the book: she’s deciding what she should do and thinking about what is possible for her in her situation, rather than reflecting on something that has happened already. It’s the difference between the past-tense of the book and the movie’s present tense. As a result of that difference, more of the thinking in the movie seems to happen in the visual dimension than the textual one. It’s not in what she says but how she looks.
GF: The question of imagination is a really fascinating one, because literature invites us to picture things, to a certain extent. But as you say, Xiao Yue, Ernaux’s style is deceptively simple—perhaps because she is so conscious of literature as a deception, or as Meghan mentions, an adaptation. Life writing is always deceiving both the reader and the writer, whereas cinema lulls you into a false sense of security. It appeals to a greater variety of our senses—the visual, the auditory, as well as the textual (especially if we’re watching with subtitles)—and therefore it makes us feel like what happens is real, or truthful. It’s fascinating to read Ernaux’s response and see how she too is enamoured with the potential of the medium.
In terms of your question on script, Xiao Yue, the film doesn’t feel very textual. The scenes that have lingered in my mind the longest are the moments without dialogue, where you can see the expressions written on Vartolomei’s face. The wide eyes, the discomfort, and the shock are all legible in some form, although not in a textual one, but I think the film does well to honour the potency of the written text. Annie’s literature studies are an undercurrent of the film, and I thought the one moment when Diwan honoured the journal motif of the book was especially striking. Annie looks in the mirror, scribbles furiously in her journal—”RIEN” (NOTHING)—and underlines it. Recalling it now, I feel like that one moment of writing encapsulates Diwan’s project, and honours Ernaux’s treatment of the written word. The violence of the sound of pen across paper, the potency of that moment with herself—writing is how we make meaning for ourselves. Diwan manipulates the cinematic form to try and make meaning for others too, extending out beyond the singular to the universal. That in itself feels like the real homage to Ernaux and her craft.
Georgina Fooks is a writer and translator based in England. She is the Director of Outreach at Asymptote, and her writing and translations have been published in Asymptote, The Oxonian Review, and Viceversa Magazine. She is currently completing a doctorate in Latin American literature at Oxford, specialising in Argentine poetry.
Meghan Racklin is a writer and editor. Her work can be found at meghanracklin.com.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor. shellyshan.com.
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