%20MOVIE%20EXPLAINED%20ENDING.jpg)
Happening (2021) Movie Ending Explained & Themes Anatomized L’événement, or Happening, is the debut managerial adventure of Audrey Diwan, which won the Golden Lion at the 78th Venice International Film Festival, 2021. It also won Anamaria Bartolomei accolades galore for her career-defining performance as Annie, the promoter in the film. The last time I felt so closeted during a movie-watching experience was with Shiva Baby, a film that makes you decreasingly tense and jittery with the addresses and the commotion. Unlike that, in this movie, we're in the French University space of Rouen, bulging with scholars, sun, and a lot of fresh air. But the camera follows Annie around so nearly, brewing upon every movement and expression of her so that it'll make you hysterical of accidentally tumbling inside the screen and sharing in Annie’s anguish.
Acclimated from Annie Ernaux’s nominal novel, Diwan choruses from abiding by Ernaux’s deep freeze, philosophical approach in chronicling this incident to the followership. The tense shots establish a womanish aspect that refuses to visualize or overtly sexualize the womanish body, or bodies, in the course of the film. The approach is fresh and well-executed at that. While Ernaux’s own jottings sought to make the particular appear political through her distance from the textbook, Diwan brings herself threateningly near to the subject she wishes to talk about, and yet she's careful to tread vocally, unafraid to show us how an act of particular choice becomes a political bone.
In doing so, this film becomes an assignment in feminist moviemaking. Still, this has also garnered enough negative reviews for the director. The film doesn’t shy down from moping upon the painful processes of illegal revocation. Bartolomei plays her part with due industriousness, shining out as the quiet, brilliant pupil in the class inversely well, as a woman dealing her gold chain to be suitable to go plutocrat for her revocation. This film also compactly lends an observance to the struggles and fears of working, middle-class women and sheds some light on the boons of the educated. It's a fantastic social drama that, I forcefully believe, deserves a lot of attention for its nuanced participation in the ongoing battles around women’s bodies and revocation of rights around the world by holding up a scrap of particular history in front of the world followership.
Still, the movie comes with its fair share of detector warnings. It can get delicate to understand the overarching social commentary about the taboo around revocation in France, especially the quiet plot resolution. Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered below. Please make sure you watch this gem of a film first before diving into the details below.
* SPOILERS AHEAD! *
HAPPENING (2021) MOVIE PLOT SYNOPSIS AND SUMMARY
It's France, 1963, and we're transported to a university space in Rouen brimming with the mellow sun, warm nights, and light colors. Annie and her musketeers try on brassieres that make their guts stand out and dock their skirts as they head to a party hard. They feel to be engaged in dancing and flirting; Annie meets a fireman from the near fire station, drinks a coke with her friend, Jean, and confides in him that the other girls in class were observing her because it suited them to suppose that she was a slut. Soon we find out that Annie is a brilliant pupil in the class and promises to help her musketeers study for their approaching final test. Still, when she's alone in her room, she checks her underpants for blood and writes in her journal, “ Still nothing”.
We snappily understand that Annie has missed her age, and it's three weeks past the due date. With the little plutocrat that she gets from her mama to buy herself a new novel, she visits a gynecologist who informs her that she's pregnant. The croaker warns her against aborting the fetus. He cites the reason as, “ Every month a girl tries her luck and ends up dying in extreme pain”. That piecemeal, the law around revocation is unstinting in France. While Annie half-heartedly passes to go back to her regular university life, the lines of mindfulness are etched on her face. She receives an instrument of gestation in the council correspondence as well. She visits another croaker, whom she informs of her gestation and the desire to repeal the fetus. The croaker gives her a shot of a drug that will make her menstruate.
Weeks start passing in, and Annie starts looking out for changes in her constitution, appetite, and sexual urges, while her grades start deteriorating. In a brief discussion with her musketeers about gestation, Helene tells them that “ gestation is the end of the world”, and she's advised by Bridgette to not joke about revocation, easily indicating that they couldn’t be reckoned upon with Annie’s secret gestation. She also realizes that discovering it for her mama isn't an option, so she chooses to tell Jean about it. Although originally floored at her, he allows her to come on with him and tries to strongly get intimate with her, citing that if she has coitus with him while she's pregnant, she won’t get pregnant with him.
She calls up Maxine, a pupil in political wisdom from Bordeaux and the father of their future sprat, informing him about her gestation and assuring him that she doesn’t want to keep it. We also find her trying to fit a knitting needle inside her vagina. The croaker informs her that the fluid she had fitted herself with to help her menstruate was actually cortisol (a hormone that strengthens the embryo) because utmost croakers in France were anti-abortion. She had managed to scrape the face of the fetus but not damage it. He asks her to, eventually, accept the gestation.
She reaches out to Helene and Bridgette about her condition, but they stop being musketeers with her, calling it none of their‘ business’. Her professor tries to get her to open up about what was bothering her. Soon, she visits Maxine in Bordeaux and receives no stopgap or help from him, eventually returning. Through her growing internal and fleshly discomfort and adding a magnet toward the fireman, she finds some information about a woman who would help with the revocation using sanitized, safe instruments.
Annie sells her particular particulars to gather the plutocrat for the procedure. Still, the procedure has little effect on her the first time, and she risks her life to go through it again. One night, Annie suffers from a concussion and bleeds out the fetus. She's taken to a sanitarium, and the croakers comment that she has had confinement. At the end of the film, we find her going back to the university on the day of her final examination.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE TITLE, HAPPENING?
Still, ‘ happening means to door to be’, denoting that commodity – an event If we lexically understand the word. In the narrative of the film, the embryo inside Annie is developing into a healthy fetus. No matter how hard she tries to repeal it, her womb refuses to hear her wishes. The paranoia around her unlooked-for gestation causes Annie to enter into a conflict with her own body.
The followership bears substantiation to this deteriorating relationship as time driblets in the course of the plot. While Annie is going through this internal fermentation, her grades at the council are deteriorating. An act is being constantly and contemporaneously. The title could also relate to a particular event or incident that stands out of the ordinary sensationally. Then, Annie’s gestation is one similar event, in the event of her eventually having a medically certified‘ confinement’.
IS HAPPENING Grounded ON REAL EVENTS?
The movie, Passing, is grounded on a script acclimated from Annie Ernaux’s popular French novel by the same name that was published in 2000. The book is semi-autobiographical, and it actually recounts Ernaux’s story of illegal revocation as a pupil in Rouen.
In numerous of Ernaux’s interviews, she has confessed to conforming to a deep freeze, realist, and objective view of the events of her life to look beyond herself and hold up a glass to the society itself. Although the script isn’t lifted from the novel, the main narrative is the same as the one in the nominal book. Hence, it can be said to be grounded on a real event.
WHY DO ANNIE ’S Stylish Musketeers LEAVE HER?
The film begins with Annie and her musketeers trying on brassieres that help their guts stand out in any outfit they wear. There's the excitement of trying commodities audacious and radical in their own ways against the morals of the more restrictive, homiletic French society around them. In fact, Bridgette goes to the extent of showing Annie and Helene in their council room the hipsterism movement that helps decide pleasure during commerce. Still, when Annie tells them about her gestation and her decision to repeal the fetus, they decide to stop being musketeers with her for two reasons.
One, they didn’t want to be associated with someone whose moral character was questionable for having had coitus; and two, the revocation was a capital crime in France since the days of the Vichy governance during World War II. Anyone ever associated with easing a pregnant woman in aborting her fetus would be thrown into captivity. We latterly come to know, when Helene confides in Annie about her relationship with a youthful boy during summer, that similar affairs were kept private substantially to keep others from developing judgments about their character and morality. This also shows that Annie’s musketeers might have been the educated, liberal youthful scholars in contemporary French society, but they were still governed by the societal exertion of their times.
HAPPENING (2021) MOVIE THEMES ANALYSED
Revocation AS A SOCIAL TABOO IN FRANCE
The revocation was a capital crime against the state in France since World War II (1939-1945). French society, being religiously Unqualified and strictly patriarchal towards its women, didn't believe in the idea of aborting a conceived child, an act of choice, since it was believed to be a gift from God. Still, post-war, France saw a rising rate of unsafe revocations. Studies also recorded a sharp rise in migration of women to the UK, which was comparatively liberal in its outlook.
With the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Alternate Coitus, an introductory and seminal textbook in the alternate-surge feminist movement, in 1949 and the preface of contraceptives in America, a rich ground was created for the important debate around women’s choice in travail. Despite these brewing exchanges and incoming changes, French society was still riddled with their traditional ban on revocation until 1975, when the government offered to legalize it under the law. The law was granted only in 1979. In this film, we're positioned in 1963, the ultimate half of the watershed period between the Second World War and the Student Protest in May 1968, which hovered to rattle the being socio-political moralities governing French law.
Talking about gestation, let alone revocation, is a hush-hush thing among the women, as we substantiate in the brief discussion between Annie and her musketeers at university. Interestingly, every discussion around gestation and revocation is saluted with a change in body language and facial expressions among the people who come to know about Annie’s gestation. The alternate gynecologist’s false drug to mislead Annie into believing that she'll have a revocation is another case of how the healthcare system was outfitted with pro-life ideas.
The illegal abortion practices rampant under the fine fabric of contemporary society are prominent from the little we hear about the women, who run their business in private, and the warning Annie receives about maintaining complete silence during the procedure so that no sound escapes the paper-thin walls of the apartment. The secretiveness around it, you can tell, is stifling. The narrative builds itself till the moment Annie eventually has a revocation and the doctor treating her in the sanitarium calls it confinement, in the event of which she gets medical treatment and is allowed to go back to fulfill her dreams. In any other case, Annie would be in captivity for her so-called crime of exercising her choice upon her own body, and, perhaps, we'd noway have a story.
CHOICE IS THE ULTIMATE MARKER OF FEMALE AGENCY
One of the more intriguing aspects of the movie is the choices the promoter makes. It's important to note then that the act of choice or picking is an important marker of womanish agency in the age-old debates around feminism in the western world. It's also true that choices are noway made in insulation and are more frequently than not always governed by socio-political, profitable, and cerebral conditions.
Then, the gestation itself is a cause of Annie’s choice to come physically intimate with Maxine during the summers. She also suffers through internal and emotional fermentation to the extent of dealing down her books at throwaway prices to execute her choice of not giving birth to a child. She's adamant in the face of social disaffection, moral policing, and available medical wisdom. She constantly repeats that she wants to finish council and come to a pen; she has a dream, and she'll not allow the baby to hinder it.
She explains her choice on one occasion when she tells her gynecologist that she'll have a child when she'll be suitable to take care of it, and having one now will leave her peppered towards it for the rest of her life. She also chooses to indulge in the advances of the fireman and has coitus with him despite the reservations of her musketeers at university. Her silence in the face of delicate questions, similar to the one posed by her professor, is also her choice. The script accommodates her choices to hint at how her particular choices have come to a political revolution for a woman of her age and time.
HAPPENING( 2021) MOVIE ENDING EXPLAINED
After Annie has collected the plutocrat for her revocation, she visits the lady whose contact she had entered before on a regular Monday autumn. The lady instructs her to make no sound indeed if she felt the sharpest stings of pain when she performed the process on her; differently, she'd be forced to terminate the process. She tells her that since her fetus was 12 weeks old formerly, aborting it would be tough but realizable. Further, she talks about other women who carried out this process using bleach and assures Annie that she was more careful with her instruments, sanitizing them regularly.
She tells Annie that by no means must she end up in a sanitarium; else, her life will be done with, and she'd give her practice down. Despite herself, during the procedure, we find Annie writhing in pain, crying out doubly, only to be glared at by the lady. After it's done, the lady tells Annie that the revocation must begin within 24 hours. Still, Annie waits, and nothing happens. She goes back to the lady and insists on going through it again, knowing completely well that it could beget serious physical medical extremities. Latterly at night, she feels a sharp pain and eventually ejects the fetus. When one of the girls finds her on the restroom seat, Annie asks her to cost a cutter and chip the umbilical cord. She starts facing concussions and losing a lot of blood once she's brought into her room, so the other girl arranges for her to be taken to a sanitarium. On the croaker’s table, Annie hears the incident being diagnosed as confinement and loses knowledge.
The film ends with Annie walking back to her class at university to take her final test. She looks determined to clear it and doesn’t draw too important attention to her presence. The schoolteacher recites many lines from Victor Hugo and instructs them to begin writing. We can assume that Annie went on to complete her education and fulfill her dream of getting a pen without allowing this unlooked-for event of gestation to define her dreams and her future.
HAPPENING (2021) MOVIE LINKS – IMDB, ROTTEN TOMATOES
HAPPENING( 2021) MOVIE CAST – ANAMARIA VARTOLOMEI, KACEY MOTTET KLEIN, LUÀNA BAJRAMI, LOUISE ORRY-DIQUÉRO, LOUISE CHEVILLOTTE, PIO MARMAÏ, SANDRINE BONNAIRE