Review: Happening Is a Grim But Timely Warning from 1960s France

In Audrey Diwan’s tense and quietly radical film Happening, Anne, a bright young student in early 1960s France, discovers she’s pregnant. The law, as the doctor who breaks the news tells her, “is unsparing.” Anyone who helps her terminate the pregnancy will land in jail, as will she. Her closest friends abandon her when she confesses her plight; the father of the unborn child absolves himself of responsibility.