This review of “Happening” was first published May 5 before the film’s opening in NYC and Los Angeles.
Rarely has there been a narrative film that feels more current than “Happening,” a French drama about the trials of a young women attempting to get an abortion — in 1963.
Audrey Diwan (“Losing It”) based her second film, the top prize-winner at last year’s Venice Film Festival, on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel of the same name. Though this is one woman’s story, Diwan (who cowrote the script with Marcia Romano) directs it with an urgency that makes clear: it could be anyone’s.
Well, not anyone, of course. But certainly anyone who finds herself pregnant without access to safe and legal abortion, which is the case for Anne (an excellent Anamaria Vartolomei). Until the moment her calendar reveals the unavoidable truth, Anne is no different from her best friends, Hélène...
Rarely has there been a narrative film that feels more current than “Happening,” a French drama about the trials of a young women attempting to get an abortion — in 1963.
Audrey Diwan (“Losing It”) based her second film, the top prize-winner at last year’s Venice Film Festival, on Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel of the same name. Though this is one woman’s story, Diwan (who cowrote the script with Marcia Romano) directs it with an urgency that makes clear: it could be anyone’s.
Well, not anyone, of course. But certainly anyone who finds herself pregnant without access to safe and legal abortion, which is the case for Anne (an excellent Anamaria Vartolomei). Until the moment her calendar reveals the unavoidable truth, Anne is no different from her best friends, Hélène...
- 5/13/2022
- by Elizabeth Weitzman
- The Wrap
"I'd like a child one day, but not instead of a life." IFC has debuted the official US trailer for an acclaimed French drama titled Happening, the second feature directed by filmmaker Audrey Diwan. This initially premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival last year, where it won the Golden Lion top prize at the end of the fest. It also stopped by the 2022 Sundance Film Festival last month and picked up more rave reviews. Adapted from Annie Ernaux's semi-autobiographical book, Happening follows Anne, a bright young student who faces an unwanted pregnancy while abortion was still illegal in 1960s France. There are more and more abortion films recently because filmmakers are turning to art to express their concerns about the growing anti-abortion movement that has been taking over recently. These films are vital and necessary. Happening stars Anamaria Vartolomei, Kacey Mottet Klein, Luàna Bajrami, Louise Orry-Diquéro, and also Louise Chevillotte.
- 2/18/2022
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Neïl Beloufa's Occidental (2017) is showing January 10 – February 8, 2019 exclusively on Mubi.In the age of globalization, French-Algerian visual artist Neïl Beloufa addresses the slippery slope of human interaction, empathy, and prejudice, cloaked in kitsch 1970s hotel environment. Shot entirely at his own studio south of Paris, Occidental is his second feature film, yet Beloufa’s career is prolific with mixed media installations and docu-fiction short films. By setting the time and tone of the film fifty years in the past, the artist makes a clear commentary on the contemporary state of exception, exemplified by protests, suspicions, homophobia, and racism—all of it glazed in vivid reds, greens, and pink, soaked in a moody score. Occidental is both a critical nod and a tribute to an imagined, capitalized, pseudo-tolerant, Wicked West. The film is centered around the Parisian hotel Occidental,...
- 1/16/2019
- MUBI
French-Algerian visual artist and filmmaker Neïl Beloufa’s second feature, Occidental, opens in media res as its eponymous setting, the tawdry Hotel Occidental, is going up in flames. Its exterior is beset by clashing police and protesters while a man is vexedly trapped inside one of the inn’s rooms, seemingly more annoyed than distraught despite his presently dire situation. This familiar setup suggests that, by the time the film catches up with this scene, the chain of events that preceded it will have provided some clarity or context for the sequence and lead to a fuller understanding of how and why things wound up this way. But as the subsequent opening credits, set against images of the lethargic, largely anonymous protest that led to the ensuing riots, imply with their dual-layered text (tinted by retro pastels scattered haphazardly around the frame), this will not be the case. Beloufa aims...
- 10/12/2017
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
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