After triumphing at the Venice Film Festival and earning recognition from the French and British film awards, the next March 18th hits movie theaters ‘The event’. This French drama Audrey Dewan It is based on the autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux, where a young student faces society and the law for the power to choose over her body and her future.
“A disease that only affects women”
‘The event’ it debuted last September at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, and was released in France a couple of months later. With several nominations for its director Audrey Dewan and its protagonist Anamaria Vartolomeithe French film finally arrives on our screens at a key moment in which sexual freedom and the right of women over their bodies is once again in question in many territories.
This French drama takes us back to the spring of 1963, with a brilliant young woman named Anne studying Letters in Angoulême. The story begins with Anne discovering that she has become pregnant, so her opportunities to finish her studies and lead the life she wants have suddenly been greatly reduced.
From that moment, Anne tries in every way to abort, despite shame and taboo that this supposes not being able to even talk about it with his friends. Also, at the time, causing an abortion was illegal in France at the time, so he doesn’t get the help he needs from his doctors or anyone around him and faces jail time for trying.
During the film, Anne herself refers to her situation as “a disease that only affects women and turns them into housewives”. Because although neither Anne nor the women who appear next to her seem to want to completely cross out the possible future of starting a family, what Anne wants is to be able to choose. And it is that ‘The event’ is presented as this, a defense of women’s freedom and free choice over our bodies and our futures.
Anne is a brilliant student whose grades begin to plummet amid the anguish caused by her pregnancy and the loneliness that surrounds her with no support, her body changing and the timer ticking faster and faster.
Because ‘The event’ is overwhelming, and a lot. From the outset, the 4:3 format helps to some extent to transport us to the stage in which the story unfolds, but it also closes the limits of what we see on screen much more.
Laurent Tangy’s photography also helps to emphasize this feeling of overwhelm and anguish. as Anne’s pregnancy progresses, with very close shots that hardly leave room to breathe and that make us focus on her all the time. It is a cold film, with clear light and pastel tones that end up reinforcing all this coldness and isolation that surrounds the situation.
It is a film that manages to perfectly convey everything that its protagonist goes through and make you part of this loneliness and this anguish and restlessnessalso showing the crudest and most explicit part of these situations.
Anamaria Vartolomei completely eats the moviesince despite the fact that Anne is not a woman in principle, neither very talkative nor extroverted, she manages to capture each of her emotions without having to open her mouth, only with her eyes.
‘The event’ is a devastating film about women’s right to autonomy that leaves no one indifferent. It shows the most horrible part of abandonment by society and how women faced the horror of clandestine or self-induced abortions when there is no safe and available way out. A brilliant and necessary story in the first person that makes it clear that these situations have been going on for many, many years, and that unfortunately it continues to be our daily bread for too many women who have no choice when a situation like this arises.