Shot in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio with a handheld, shoulder-mounted camera following our central character Anne (Anamaria Vartolomei) continuously, the visual style creates a claustrophobic, immediate sense of isolation and panic. Anne comes from a working-class background (her parents run a rural bar/café). Higher education is her single ticket to social mobility and independence. The patriarchal legal and medical systems of the day place the full burden of pregnancy - and the punishment for unwanted pregnancies - on young women, while men remain exempt from consequences.
It's very sad for Anne, as she is a brilliant literature student at university with a promising academic career. We are shown how she is clearly ahead of her classmates in study as those around her flounder often. So, after realising that her period is late, she checks her calendar obsessively. She visits a local doctor, who confirms she is pregnant. When she begs him for help terminating it, he coldly refuses, reminding her that it is illegal.
In desperation, she seeks out a second doctor in the city who appears more sympathetic. He prescribes her an injection, claiming it will induce a miscarriage, but for reasons that come out later, it doesn't work. As the weeks pass, depicted in chapter captions, Anne’s academic performance deteriorates due to exhaustion, worry and stress. When she attempts to ask her close dorm friends, Brigitte and Hélène, for assistance in finding help, they shut her down instantly. Helping her could land them in prison, leaving Anne entirely isolated.
She meets up with Maxime, the child's father, who is indifferent and expects her to deal with the "problem" alone so it doesn't affect his equally-ambitious life. Another male classmate, Jean, promises to help, only to turn around and proposition her for sex, reasoning that since she's already pregnant, there’s "no risk". Driven to extremities, Anne locks herself in her room, heats a knitting needle over a flame and attempts a self-administered back-alley procedure. The painful attempt fails completely.
Jean eventually introduces Anne to a female acquaintance who had successfully obtained a clandestine abortion. She gives Anne the contact details for a back-street abortionist (a faiseuse d'anges/'angel maker') named Mme Rivière. Anne sells her books, clothes and personal belongings to scrape together the required 400 francs. She travels to Mme Rivière’s small apartment. On a kitchen table, the woman gets to work and we, the audience, are right up close with her as it's being done. Complications set in and another visit is needed.
Anne lives in a students' residential block at the educational establishment where all the facilities are shared by the girls - including very open showering. In letting the viewer in on so much nudity, I guess the film is depicting not only the lack of control that the state imposes regarding the above, but also the lack of common dignity and privacy imposed on these girls in a shared facility.
We stick with Anne as she goes through agonising procedures and the intense, bloody aftermath of that in her bedroom and communal bathroom. Again, nothing is left to the imagination and what happens is graphically portrayed on film. Even if she is successful in getting rid of the foetus, the next step is getting a doctor to 'mark it down' as a spontaneous miscarriage rather than an illegal abortion, for which she would face immediate prosecution and jail.
What we end up with here is almost documentary - the reality of what young women went through in the 1960s. Because the handheld camera sits practically on Vartolomei’s shoulder, the scale of performance had to be suitably contained. Diwan noted that when a lens is that close, even a micro-expression or a small smile looks massive on screen. Rather than relying on a heavy musical score to build tension, she used Vartolomei’s actual breathing patterns like a musical rhythm to signal Anne's plight. The film won the Golden Lion at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021 by a unanimous jury vote (headed by Bong Joon-ho) and Vartolomei’s turn as Anne earned her the César Award for Most Promising Actress and the Lumières Award for Best Actress.
It's a harrowing watch in many ways, a real fly-on-the-wall drama, sadly based on truth. Without spoiling the outcomes for anyone wanting to track this down, on various streaming platforms in the UK now, it's often moving and sad. We're really encouraged to get onside with Anne and feel the stress, anxiety and pain that she does. The supporting cast are very good as well, not a poor actor on display throughout. Certainly worth tracking down if you are up for the no-holds-barred graphic depictions highlighting the story's elements or the social and religion-based controls of the day.
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