In her memoir Happening, Annie Ernaux describes abortion as a “thing that had no place in language”. The French writer had an illegal abortion in 1963, an experience she recounts in brutal, clear-eyed detail. Her descriptions of the procedure are striking for their directness, but also their rarity.
I thought about this while watching April, the stark and beautiful film from Georgian film-maker Dea Kulumbegashvili, co-produced by Luca Guadagnino. It follows Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician who performs secret abortions, and finds herself under investigation after a stillborn delivery in the hospital where she works. In front of a panel of three men, she explains that the mother hadn’t registered the pregnancy.
“Murderer!” snarls the baby’s father, spitting at her from across the table, adding that he knows she performs abortions in the villages. On-screen portrayals of abortionists are few and far between. Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women stars Isabelle Huppert as a version of the abortionist Marie-Louise Giraud, a flawed, pragmatic character whose actions saw her receive the guillotine in France in 1943.
In Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, set in London circa 1950, when abortion was still a crime in Britain, Imelda Staunton’s backstreet abortionist is motivated by kindness. The abortionist encountered by the pregnant protagonist in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, on the other hand, is a nightmarish sexual predator. More recently women-authored abortion scenes have offered different, more hopeful portrayals.
In Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the abortionist is a female healer whose own small children are present on the bed during the procedure. It is not presented as painless but neither is it framed as a traumatic or unsavoury event. Similarly, in Eliza Hittman’s coolly restrained pro-choice drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always, the access hurdles faced by the 17-year-old Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) are much scarier than the abortion itself, which is administered by a group of supportive female doctors.
In Georgia, abortions are legal for pregnancies up to 12 weeks but so frowned upon that many doctors refuse to perform them. April, which won the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is about a woman who is driven by an inner sense of justice, and, perhaps more interestingly, an inescapable feeling of despair. Nina spends her nights having anonymous sex with strangers and driving out to villages via seemingly endless roads.
Her bleak destinations feel ironic against the grandeur and beauty of the countryside. Cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan, who also shot Guadagnino’s cannibal road-trip movie Bones and All, captures confronting violet and navy blue skies, heavy (or perhaps even pregnant) with melancholy. Ernaux is right that there is an absence of language, written or visual, to describe the act of terminating a pregnancy by choice.
Kulumbegashvili begins to create a vocabulary by first depicting a birth. Early on in April, a bird’s-eye-view shot shows a baby being born in unflinching, clinical detail. We don’t see the mother’s face, just her body.
Kulumbegashvili spent a year and a half embedded in a real maternity ward in Georgia, where she filmed several real births. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It’s a serious approach that declines to show the audience the mother’s catharsis, a challenge to the idea that birth is always joy, and abortion always terror. The film immediately sets up the idea that abortion is not a moral issue, but an aspect of women’s health.
In one scene, Nina gives a married 16-year-old a plastic bag containing the pill. Kulumbegashvili wants us to bear witness to this act, too. A recent theatre adaptation of Ernaux’s The Years stages a version of the abortion scene from Happening.
It is impressionistic rather than graphic, and yet the monologue that accompanies the scene is visceral. Nearly every performance of the play has been interrupted due to an audience member fainting. April builds to a climactic set-piece in which Nina performs an abortion.
It couldn’t really be called gory, but still, it’s an agonising watch. A non-verbal teenage girl whose pregnancy is the product of family abuse lies on her back on the kitchen table that has been covered in a sheet of plastic. The shot is stationary, the camera by her side, unflinching.
All we see are the girl’s squirming abdomen, her raised knees, and her mother’s reassuring hands. By refusing to break the shot, Kulumbegashvili dares us not to look away. “April” is in cinemas now [See also: Joan Didion without her style] Related
