Anne (Anamaria Bartolomei) is a bright young woman, a student at the secondary level, somewhere in France in 1963. She lives in a society that seems at once distant and close. Sex is taboo, the desire réfréné, frustration, and hypocrisy reign everywhere. To succeed, it is necessary to make higher studies, especially when it comes from a modest background as she. It is a France wishing to copy, prudish, pre-68, which corsète the youth, especially women. Anne will say in the movie about dancing :
“Everybody’s looking for the same thing here, but no one dares to say.”
It is one of the great ideas of Audrey Diwan, push-overs, at least in the beginning, the impulses repressed youth. To start with the sex.
Do not practice it, talk about it only in the secret rooms academics, be respectable in public. Before contraception, fear of daughter-mother is omnipresent, that of miss exams also.
Anne and her friends then try to navigate in an environment that encloses their bodies but would want to free their minds by the teaching.
The staging is a minimalist French filmmaker, for whom it was the second feature film after But You’re Crazy (2018), set its heroine and its viewer to a picture format, square, 1:37, format, both immersive and claustrophobic. One inevitably thinks of Gus Van Sant as the camera wanders on the campus of the Elephant in this same format.
Anne is so often followed by back, up close, which is in front of it is vague and menacing. The social drama mute little at a time, thriller, helped by the minimalist music of Evgueni and Sacha Galperin.
A countdown appears on the screen. Anne has not had her period for three weeks, which she was worried about. The triggering event had taken place before the movie…
The event we jostled inevitably. What is played is of an intensity vital. The right of a woman to dispose of her body, without it cost him to prison or to the life…
The appointments with the doctors are linked together. Some show themselves to be considerate of other criminals. All of them are resigning in the face of the only possible outcome. During the entire duration of the film, the word abortion is never pronounced.
Anne is so pregnant. But with this pregnancy, it’s decidedly not.
Anne is alone, in the face of his belly which rounds off, wiping the dirty looks of the women and the cowardice of men.
For all that, Audrey Diwan does not judge or condemn its characters. Some will find an outpouring of compassion unexpected emergency that saw the heroine, which makes the film human and extract any vision of manichéiste or sexist.
The event switches, in its last third, in a quasi-exorcism movie.
This foreign body, Anne wants to get it out, whatever the cost. What was out of the field then becomes the central subject, the obsession. The world around becomes a blur. How, concretely, when no doctor, no institution wants you to help ? As the weeks pass, the more difficult it is to avert your eyes.
Clinical, film savings, then nothing for the viewer. The ” maker of angels “, the knitting needles, probes, or the pain of a martyred body of a woman who committed no crime. A woman wishing to simply return to its original state and the opportunity to continue his life freely.
The journey of Anne becomes an ordeal experiencing reminded me, this time, the films sacrificial Darren Aronofsky, including Mother ! or Black Swan, which has directly inspired the filmmaker to feed the game of the actress.
And what an actress ! Anamaria Vartolomei carries the film with a dogged determination. His gaze captivates and makes us feel the steps, even the most difficult of those few crucial months in the life of this woman. His phrasing, and his voice, faithful to what we imagine of the 60s, we are facing. It gives an uncommon mystery of this actress Audrey Diwan and Laurent Tangerine, chief operator, were able to return.
Of each plan, and a total abandonment, Vartolomei is a choice of casting is imposing as a highlight and contributing a lot to the rain of awards received by the film, starting with the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice film Festival.
But there is something else that is being played. We feel at Anne’s motivation, other than the fear of what will be said, to give up this pregnancy. The actress sometimes gives the feeling that, even in the 2021, in a social context more favourable, Anne would not, in spite of everything, ‘t keep this child. He plays something unyielding, almost martial. Want to enjoy fully his own body and not to allow anyone to alter, without his consent.
The actress speaks to the inner strength : “I had always in mind this phrase : Anne is a soldier. She participated in the war. She has allies that it loses its way. She ends up in earth. It gives him a beating. But she gets up […] Anne never give the eyes “.
With The event, Audrey Diwan sign a film, fighting, needed, without compromise, worn by the revelation incandescent Anamaria Vartolomei. It is certainly one of the most beautiful movies of year 2021 particularly rich for the French cinema (Lost Illusions, Bottom, Annette, Everything went well, Titanium).
After the Festival, the place to Caesar ?
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