Winner at the Venice film festival, Audrey Diwan’s film captures the panic of an unwanted pregnancy before the legalisation of abortion in provincial France
Here is a brutal Handmaid’s Tale from our recent European past: a situation that still exists in many parts of the world, longed for by reactionary nostalgists elsewhere. Happening is the admirable French drama from director and co-writer Audrey Diwan which won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival; it is an impeccably produced movie, faintly old-fashioned in its vehement emotional message, adapted from an autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux.
The setting is provincial France in 1963, just before the permissive society and the pop culture revolution – and certainly before the legalisation of abortion, which did not happen in France until 1975. Newcomer Anamaria Vartolomei plays Anne Duchesne, a very talented student of literature who in one scene stuns her professor and classmates by knowing what “anaphora” is.
Here is a brutal Handmaid’s Tale from our recent European past: a situation that still exists in many parts of the world, longed for by reactionary nostalgists elsewhere. Happening is the admirable French drama from director and co-writer Audrey Diwan which won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival; it is an impeccably produced movie, faintly old-fashioned in its vehement emotional message, adapted from an autobiographical novel by Annie Ernaux.
The setting is provincial France in 1963, just before the permissive society and the pop culture revolution – and certainly before the legalisation of abortion, which did not happen in France until 1975. Newcomer Anamaria Vartolomei plays Anne Duchesne, a very talented student of literature who in one scene stuns her professor and classmates by knowing what “anaphora” is.
- 4/20/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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