Laissez-moi mon enfant

Enclosure at 15 years, Mariel Hemingway chooses to leave a possessive mother and an irritable father-in-law to raise only his child. In the same small city, a young couple hopelessly seeks to adopt a child. An edifying drama, but sometimes a little too naive.

I saw this made for tv film, and it made me cry. In this film, a fifteen year old girl gets pregnant by her boyfriend and decides to keep her baby. She moves out of her house, and into a home for unwed mothers. It's amazing the struggle she goes through. Life is tough. I just couldn't believe the beautifully realistic, but frightening way it was portrayed, with the girl literally at her wits end. In the conclusion, the girl finally makes what seems to be the right choice, and all ends well. As I said before, moving, very moving. This a movie that every teenager needs to see.

I remember seeing the movie when I was just a little boy staying up late at my grandmother's house. It started at 1AM and went to 3AM. The more tired I got, the more dramatic the movie seemed. I guess it was good acting, but I am remembering it from over 15 years ago through the eyes of a 9 year old, and it definitely had a positive moral value. I remember one scene where she went down to the pool to go swimming and left the baby alone, and her mom came home, found the baby alone and yelled at her. That scene made an impression because at that point I was so stupid I thought babies would perish IMMEDIATELY if they were left alone for one second. So I sided with the mother in the conflict, but I guess that was a scene that was meant to make the mother seem "overbearing". Overall, if you have NOTHING else to watch, and it's really late at night, and you're still young enough to think staying up late makes you cool, this movie will kill two hours.

Young Mariel Hemingway (playing fifteen, and perhaps actually fifteen, but looking and sounding twelve) is a new mother trying to survive the rigors of being on her own and raising her infant. This TV-film isn't no-holds-barred, and it cannot escape sentimentality--particularly at the end--however it does have something. It puts a good-if-green actress at the center and gives her character some tough life-lessons to deal with in a credible fashion. I felt for Mariel having to turn down dates because of her baby, working late hours at a fast food joint, living in squalid places, and yet determined to be independent and succeed. It's probably very real in its dramatization of events (this is a young woman with few people on her side), and even if the picture doesn't always hit the right chords, it's very grounded and sometimes very natural.

and you'll see that they're quite similar. I Want To Keep My Baby starred Mariel Hemingway as a girl who became pregnant by her boyfriend and decided to keep her baby, whom she named Elizabeth, after the youngest daughter on The Waltons, rather than give it up for adoption or raise it at home with her meddling mother. Sue Ann Cunningham is your average Southern California teenager. She gives birth, and becomes an irresponsible mother. Her boyfriend refuses to take care of their daughter, and she goes about her normal teenage activities, including going to the pool in their apartment complex, with her friends. This is similar to the ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager. This movie was the inspiration for that series. It also inspired the ABC After School Special Teenage Father, and three episodes of 7th Heaven about teenage pregnancy. Watch this movie and then ABC Family's The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and you'll see the similarities.