FYC: Best Adapted Screenplay - 'Happening'
The Golden Lion winner is eligible for the 95th Academy Awards ceremony.
Been seeing people talking about the adapted screenplay category as being quite ‘open’ this year. Time will tell if this is the case but if so, that could lead to some interesting choices. And I would love to see Audrey Diwan’s Happening contend for a surprise nomination in this category. Diwan and Marcia Romano’s screenplay adapts Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel of a young student seeking out an illegal abortion in 1960s France. The source material is a courgaeous work of memorialisation and recollection, with Ernaux’s rumination on her experiences with the social stigmas and denial of rights packing so much power within a relatively short length. Much of the novel revolves around inner dialogue, at once lyrical and to the point, with great effect in getting to know what she’s going through. What’s notable in the adaptation by Diwan and Romano is that this is omitted, but at the same time not discarded. Some of this has to do with Diwan’s brilliant direction where the visuals do so much to convey the internal life of Anne (the brilliant Anamaria Vartolomei). A lot also has to do with the screenplay, which through adaptation takes on a different approach to the material, but one where the the young student’s experiences remain just as immersive.
By removing the internal dialogue and also many of the lyrical observations on the particular era, Diwan and Romano craft a film that retains the 60s setting, but with slightly less specificity and in turn, more universality, a disconcerting connect to our present. References to the time period are subtly integrated in but the overarching focus is on the personal against the public stigma against, and illegality of abortion. A choice I feel makes it hit all the more harder as we consciously draw parallels and feel the pain of how even to this day, many young women around the world continue to face the same predicament as Anne. Not that much has changed. The omissions that Diwan and Romano make from the source material all are in service of the way in which the film. In contrast to Ernaux’s work which deals in retrospect, has a preoccupation with immediacy. By omitting the present day reflections that might have ‘confined the film to the past’, Diwan and Romano make adjustments to put us in the position of Anne, utilising the medium of cinema to create the sensation of being by her side, in her position. Thus making Diwan’s film and Ernaux’s novel co-exist with one another as perfect companion pieces, with one focusing on the contemporaneity of the material while the other focuses on the retrospect.
Diwan and Romano retain so much of the haunting power of the novel’s passages, but also the warmth and strength in the brief periods of respite. It is the best kind of adaptation which changes up the text, while retaining said text’s strengths in a direction repurposed for the medium of film.