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17 Girls REVIEWED BY LISA NESSELSON


When one headstrong young woman in a French seaside community finds herself accidentally preg- nant, more than a dozen of her high-school class- mates decide to join her in 17 Girls (17 Filles). Anyone — male or female — who grew up when an out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy was as welcome as a nuclear attack will be slack-jawed in amaze- ment as the title batch of 16-year-olds conclude that it will be federating and fun (as opposed to foolish and options-limiting) to raise their babies together in a sort of girl-power commune whose logistics are never discussed in depth. Taking inspiration from a real-life example in


the US in 2008, the sister writing-and-directing team of Delphine and Muriel Coulin have made an altogether French film populated with fresh-faced and energetic young women as stubborn and gung-ho as they are oblivious. Tailor-made for fes- tivals, this feature debut (after five noteworthy shorts) marks the sisters as talents to watch. A more down-to-earth and mundane 21st-


century answer to Picnic At Hanging Rock, the film is a portrait of schoolgirls caught up in exceptional circumstances. In thrall to ultimately inexplicable forces, they are forever changed by one girl’s charisma. With the screen completely black, a girl’s voice-


over tells us that the Brittany town of Lorient was overrun with ladybugs that autumn. We then discover most of the youthful cast standing in a corridor in their panties and bras waiting to


n 24 Screen International at the Cannes Film Festival May 15, 2011


CRITICS’ WEEK


Fr. 2011. 91mins Director/screenplay Delphine Coulin, Muriel Coulin Production companies Archipel 35, Arte France Cinema, Canal Plus, CinéCinéma International sales Films Distribution, www. filmsdistribution.com Producer Denis Freyd Executive producer André Bouvard Cinematography Jean-Louis Vialard Production designer Benoit Pfauwadel Editor Guy Lecorne Main cast Louise Grinberg, Juliette Darche, Roxane Duran, Esther Garrel, Yara Pilartz, Solene Rigot, Noémie Lvovsky, Florence Thomassin, Carlo Brandt


receive a perfunctory check-up from the school nurse (Lvovsky). At exam’s end, Camille (Grinberg) announces


that she might be pregnant. Five days later when she informs her four closest girlfriends, she is eight weeks along. Camille has not yet told her sin- gle mum (Thomassin), and is not at all sure she wants to abort the foetus, the result of a one-night stand with a handsome classmate to whom she seems indifferent. The girls are all ‘good’ kids — recreational drug


use and drinking are minimal. Cigarette smoking is as rebellious as it gets. Where a lot of movies would show embarrassed teens shoplifting a home-pregnancy test, here a group of girls go to the pharmacy, ask if pregnancy tests are “re-usa- ble” and, learning they are not, plunk down the cash for a dozen kits. The young women set about getting knocked


up. There is no peer pressure, in the traditional bul- lying sense. These young ladies genuinely seem to think it would be fun to have babies and raise them as a group (even a classroom screening of a yucky live-birth film does not slow the march of twitching ovaries). Their town does not have much to offer so the girls opt to skip the soul-searching and simply propel themselves into adulthood en masse. They are exultant instead of panicked. That their poorly defined project might squash


their futures or lead to regrets does not seem to cross anyone’s mind, though there are a fair number of wordless shots of individual girls sit- ting on their beds with far-off expressions closer to shell-shock than bliss. At least one character is willing to resort to sub- terfuge to be part of the pregnant clan, whose


members are seen doing relaxation exercises together in a swimming pool with their bellies proudly protruding from the water. Camille’s mother thinks her daughter is an idiot


to complete the pregnancy and points out she can- not even keep her room tidy let alone care for a child. Clementine’s (Pilartz) parents are furious. Her father wants to confront the boy responsible (in reality, Clem paid him to deflower her). Her mother says she still plays with stuffed toys and that her tiny build makes a pregnancy risky. The school’s staff is baffled and unprepared for


such an unprecedented epidemic of poor judg- ment with lasting consequences. An older female staffer offers comic relief when she posits this might be “progress” since unwed teen pregnancy used to be a catastrophic social blunder. The male gym teacher whines, “I have a curricu-


lum to follow — do I include the high jump or not?” Non-French audiences may be surprised to


learn that minors can decide whether to continue or abort a pregnancy without any parental juris- diction. Some viewers may be even more surprised when the school nurse, unsettled, asks very-preg- nant Camille, “Mind if I smoke?” and lights up. Camille is strong, self-possessed and pretty, and


other girls want to be like her. A sort of group mind takes hold, perhaps analogous to a bunch of underage male buddies signing up for the army together — not because of a draft but because it seems like an adventure they can share. Shooting in their home town of Lorient, the


directors capture an ineffable sense of place against which universal emotions play out. The cast of mostly first-time young actresses is con- vincing across the board.


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