The past few years, some (by no means all) in the French film world have taken to heart the lessons of #MeToo, and thought critically about what role women play in the cinema, onscreen and off. This led to the founding of Le Collectif 50/50, which militates for equality of representation and compensation within the industry. Diwan was one of the first signatories when the group was launched, and when she made Happening, she assembled a team of mainly female crew members around her.

Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo

Diwan stays close to Anne’s perspective; we spend much of the film looking directly over Vartolomei’s shoulder. The feeling of closeness, almost of claustrophobia, is emphasised by Diwan’s decision to film in a nearly square format (using a 1.37:1 aspect ratio) rather than a more conventional widescreen format. “The idea was to focus on her body and not the setting. I asked myself: how can I film this so that we’re not watching Anne, but rather become her?”This approach to writing is underpinned by a mission. Ernaux believes that writing about the self inevitably involves writing about a socio-political context, and thereby extends the representativeness of her own experience. By writing simply about her own experiences, she also wants to write into literature the collective experience of the French working-class. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

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As a writer, she realised that her daily life was not represented in either the French literature she read at home or in the classrooms she learnt and later taught in. It was at school that she became aware of a “ familiarity, a subtle complicity” as her teachers avidly listened to the stories of her middle-class schoolmates but silenced her attempts to speak about her home life. These experiences permeate her work, which repeatedly touches on the conflict between what she calls “the dominant class” and “the dominated class”, referencing the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. But she has also been asked many times in promoting the film if it espouses a “female gaze”, a term that has been popularised in French cinema over the past few years, in part thanks to the work of the French writer and scholar Iris Brey. Her book Le regard féminin ( The Female Gaze, 2020) built on a tradition of feminist film theory to offer a mode by which a film could be understood, or not, to enact a female point of view, “a gaze,” as Brey wrote, “that allows us to share the lived experience of a female body onscreen”. Anamaria Vartolomei, left, and Sandrine Bonnaire in Happening. Photograph: Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Fi/AP Growing up in a socially divided environment meant Ernaux felt ashamed of the supposedly distasteful aspects of her upbringing, such as the working-class environment of her father’s cafe or her mother’s shirking of the norms of middle-class housewifery and femininity, which she writes about in A Frozen Woman.

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. There are more oblique references to the time as well. At the lunch table, the girls debate Camus versus Sartre, “a question of the gaze”. In their literature lecture, the professor reads a poem by Louis Aragon called “Elsa au miroir” (Elsa at Her Mirror), about his wife, Elsa Triolet, “combing her golden hair, as if she enjoyed tormenting her memory”. Anne is called on to give her reading of the poem. “He uses a lover’s drama to evoke a national one. It’s a political poem. For me they’re war references. In 1942, when the poem was published, Elsa Triolet and Aragon were communists. So I think they both hope for a patriotic awakening.” With this reading, Anne reframes what seems like a private concern as a public one. Audrey Diwan after winning the Golden Lion award for Happening at the Venice film festival last year. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy The academy praised her “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”.