Taboo Fantasies: Teaching Annie

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It’s cheering to see Ernaux’s genius and her fearlessness acclaimed by the Nobel committee. The daughter of parents who owned a cafe-cum-grocery shop, she has something in common with Elena Ferrante in her reflections on social class and education and the gulfs they can create. Her work echoes the experiences of many women of her generation who sought liberation through learning and creativity. We are made of words, she told one interviewer (in French); they travel through us. That is how it feels to read her, too. That desire to give voice to marginalised experiences is further illustrated in two of her “external diaries”, Exteriors and Things Seen, which record the everyday exchanges of people in outside spaces such as the supermarket or when commuting on the Paris metro. People asked me, why make this movie now,” when abortion is legal in France? But, Diwan points out, “what happened in France is still unfortunately the case in many countries. And while I was making the film, I learned what was happening in Texas, where they were challenging Roe v Wade, and then people’s reactions changed completely. They started saying it was good to make this film now, that it was necessary.” I did this film with anger, with desire, with my belly, my guts, my heart and my head,” Diwan said, accepting her award in Venice. “I have finished putting into words what I consider to be an extreme human experience, bearing on life and death, time, law, ethics and taboo – an experience that sweeps through the body,” wrote Ernaux at the end of her book. Diwan herself describes feeling at first “joyful” about having the term applied to her work, but that more recently she’s had the impression that her gaze has been “circumscribed” by her gender, that as a director she was “reduced to and defined by” her gender. No sooner had she accepted the mantle of the female gaze than she was “limited” by it.

Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo Elena Koshka in Pure Taboo

This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally, it is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.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. And 1942 is only 20 years before Anne and her friends sit in their amphitheatre; they live in a world that is still processing the horrors of the second world war. France’s former colonies fought for their independence: the first Indochina war ended eight years earlier, and the Algerian war has only just ended the previous year, another debacle to which the French establishment refused to put in words – they called it the événements en Algérie, the “events” in Algeria, using the same word Ernaux chose for her title. “This thing,” Ernaux writes, “had no place in language.” In Happening, Ernaux writes, “I don’t believe there is a single museum in the world whose collections feature a work called The Abortionist’s Studio”. Why, I asked her, is it so important for artists or writers to depict it, to tell the stories of their own bodies? But I don’t think any woman would have made the same film. The gaze is complex, and gender is only one part of it,” she says. But films have a visual power that books usually do not. There is one scene in particular that Ernaux and Diwan both refer to that I can’t describe here because it would ruin the taut suspense of the story and undermine Diwan’s carefully paced work. In describing what was at stake for Diwan filming that scene, Ernaux told me, “it was important to dare to confront the viewer with an unbearable image… I did it in my book, but I knew it would be a more difficult proposition to do it in the film. Audrey didn’t hesitate, and she pulled it off.”

Annie Ernaux and writing from Nobel prize in literature: Annie Ernaux and writing from

The word abortion isn’t uttered once. The idea was to focus on her body, not the setting – so that we’re not watching Anne but become her Audrey Diwan I have finished putting into words what I consider to be an extreme human experience, hearing on life and death, time, law, ethics and taboo ‒ an experience that sweeps through the body. E.L.: I definitely made this film with the intention to arouse, because that's what I do. It's just another kind of arousal than what we are used to. Most of the XConfessions stories are fictional, but lately, I've been making films in which we get to know real couples and we get to see the kind of sex they have in their ordinary lives. The idea is that these documentaries will show you different ideas around sex, because I think that people — we have so many questions. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Now I know that this ordeal and this sacrifice were necessary for me to want to have children. To accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me.

Class conflict

The Years is her masterwork as far as this technique is concerned. It is a book that manages to be both an intimate history and a grand, sweeping one. It is the chronicle of an entire generation told through the subjectivity of just one woman’s body and mind. If the modernists gave us stream of consciousness, Ernaux gives us a kind of merging of that individual consciousness into a profound, unified collectivism. To read, for example, Simple Passion is to bear witness to a doomed love affair between two people at a certain point in history. But it is also to feel that thwarted desire, that rejection and desperation ourselves. A more abject book about love has never been written – which makes it sound downbeat, but it isn’t, it’s effervescent.

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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. I have rid myself of the only feeling of guilt in connection with this event: the fact that it had happened to me and I had done nothing about it. A sort of discarded present. Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people. Excerpted from Happening by Annie Ernaux, Audrey Diwan after winning the Golden Lion award for Happening at the Venice film festival last year. Photograph: Sipa US/Alamy Diwan chose not to integrate these present-day reflections, in a voiceover for instance. “If I had included the author looking in the rearview mirror I would have confined this film to the past,” she said. And in her adaptation, Diwan tells me, it was important that Happening not feel like an artefact.ALLURE: We’re living longer lives than ever before, so watching John and Annie gives me hope that my sex life will be long, too. Also, I love that they both got turned on to this particular form of lovemaking later in life.