Annie stands alone.
There is a bustling flow and swirl of students inside Happening's 1960s French collegiate town. Then there is Annie. Separate, captured in more reflective posture; watching more than partaking.
She is a school girl, and she describes herself as a woman with a problem.
Her value, within our relationship as spectator to subject, is tied up in how her actions double back on our own: she actively looks at others, distanced from her own peers. Annie is not in step with women inside this illustrated universe. She can not refuse her interest in sex, and she can not accept that pregnancy is its irrefutable bi-product.
Happening has a self-consciousness in its own title -- it is not only an occurrence but something active; encroaching. There is no distance at which to reflect or exhale. This establishes a viewer/subject inquiry based upon the need for a closer examination of a figure's character. No longer a top academic contender as she becomes occupied with securing illegal abortion services, the narrative moves Annie into a peripheral figure. Finding an abortionist and evading arrest is the singular goal to attain and obsess over. It remains this way; overtaking the past goal of academic success, until her failed abortion attempts extend to physical consequence. The parallel goal and obsession to escape more injury shifts Annie's life toward a singular tracked forward motion. Each action that does not yet bring her to her goal has a subsequent action and corporeal mis-step, at quickened pace as attempts accumulate with a collapsing temporal possibility of success.
At 23 years old Annie is sexy, and in several sequences where the camera perches near but just behind and to the side of her face, the supple cheekiness of it reminds us her sensuality is bracketed by vestiges of childhood.This romance of Anne's sun kissed figure, dewy face and emotional registers is the camera's effort to equalize the threat of excessive reality intruding on the film's beautiful elements.
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