Taboo Fantasies: Teaching Annie

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In terms of the film’s cinematography, Diwan wanted to give a sense of the era without recreating it mimetically. “I asked the art director to create [a version of] the 1960s that would go unnoticed. The costumer was tasked with representing a certain social class without pointing it out. For example all the working-class students were very restricted in terms of what they wore – Annie [Ernaux] told me that – they each have three outfits, all that would fit in the kind of small leather suitcase they would have brought from home to university. I did this film with anger, with desire, with my belly, my guts, my heart and my head,” Diwan said, accepting her award in Venice. “I have finished putting into words what I consider to be an extreme human experience, bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics and taboo – an experience that sweeps through the body,” wrote Ernaux at the end of her book.

Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.Diwan chose not to integrate these present-day reflections, in a voiceover for instance. “If I had included the author looking in the rearview mirror I would have confined this film to the past,” she said. And in her adaptation, Diwan tells me, it was important that Happening not feel like an artefact. These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Annie Ernaux writes in Happening, her slim retelling of the clandestine abortion she had in the 1960s, when the procedure was still illegal in France. “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.” Her most famous work, The Years, is considered to be her magnum opus. It can be read as a further example of a “public diary” in that it covers the socio-cultural history of France, mixing her own story (relayed through the representative “she”) with the collective story of her generation. Nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019, The Years made English-speaking audiences aware of her work – and that attention has now happily been extended by the jury of the Nobel prize in literature.

Carol Cross — The Movie Database (TMDB) Carol Cross — The Movie Database (TMDB)

Siobhán McIlvanney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. Partners Audrey Diwan after winning the Golden Lion award for Happening at the Venice film festival last year. Photograph: Sipa US/AlamyThis neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Now I know that this ordeal and this sacrifice were necessary for me to want to have children. To accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me. People asked me, why make this movie now,” when abortion is legal in France? But, Diwan points out, “what happened in France is still unfortunately the case in many countries. And while I was making the film, I learned what was happening in Texas, where they were challenging Roe v Wade, and then people’s reactions changed completely. They started saying it was good to make this film now, that it was necessary.” But she has also been asked many times in promoting the film if it espouses a “female gaze”, a term that has been popularised in French cinema over the past few years, in part thanks to the work of the French writer and scholar Iris Brey. Her book Le regard féminin ( The Female Gaze, 2020) built on a tradition of feminist film theory to offer a mode by which a film could be understood, or not, to enact a female point of view, “a gaze,” as Brey wrote, “that allows us to share the lived experience of a female body onscreen”.

Annie Ernaux ‘It plunged me back to waiting for a period’: Annie Ernaux

The word abortion isn’t uttered once. The idea was to focus on her body, not the setting – so that we’re not watching Anne but become her Audrey Diwan I have rid myself of the only feeling of guilt in connection with this event: the fact that it had happened to me and I had done nothing about it. A sort of discarded present. Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them. 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. Excerpted from Happening by Annie Ernaux, And 1942 is only 20 years before Anne and her friends sit in their amphitheatre; they live in a world that is still processing the horrors of the second world war. France’s former colonies fought for their independence: the first Indochina war ended eight years earlier, and the Algerian war has only just ended the previous year, another debacle to which the French establishment refused to put in words – they called it the événements en Algérie, the “events” in Algeria, using the same word Ernaux chose for her title. “This thing,” Ernaux writes, “had no place in language.”Diwan herself describes feeling at first “joyful” about having the term applied to her work, but that more recently she’s had the impression that her gaze has been “circumscribed” by her gender, that as a director she was “reduced to and defined by” her gender. No sooner had she accepted the mantle of the female gaze than she was “limited” by it.