17 filles

Men, women, young, old, when somebody from France makes a movie about coming of age the best word to describe that work is slime.

Slow script. Rigid delivery. The production team is unable to get closer to the chosen issue, but at least they can take the clothes off some young bodies and parade them around for the viewing pleasure of an audience that might creep a lot of people.

Whatever bar I once had to measure boredom while watching a movie, it might have been surpassed by 17 Girls. It's hard for me to even express how little interest I had in this film. I dozed off 3 times, before deciding I had to stop and wait to finish the film the next day. Basically what seems to have happened is that a couple of filmmakers found out the true story of a high school where a bunch of girls all decided to get pregnant and raise their kids together. The problem was that, when writing the screenplay, they didn't take the time in order to make a plot or characters to help engage the audience in the story of these girls, so there's very little movie here. There are barely any defining characteristics to differentiate any of the stars of the film other than their names and faces. A couple times they have very minor personality traits, but most of the way through it's just a mass of pregnant teens. The ending might have been the most anticlimactic thing I've ever seen, and it left me annoyed. There's simply no movie here, I don't even know if there is enough for a short film. Perhaps that's the artistic statement Delphine and Muriel Coulin were trying to make, a film that was just as vapid as the teens featured in it. If you are looking to fall asleep quickly, then a little time with 17 Girls might take care of that for you.

17 Girls (2011)

Lots of mid-teen girl stuff on French beaches. And yet supposedly a social issue movie about a rash of intentional pregnancies at a high school. There are scenes between the girls that pry into contemporary youth culture but only get the lid off. This is a sensational idea with the depth of a single gasp.

Even stranger, once you get into it, is how the movie makers, the writer/director pair Delphine and Muriel Coulin (both did both), took an American high school news story and adapted it to this small industrial coastal city in France. It doesn't right true. The utter rebellion of the kids to reason, their various trajectories around peer pressure and media hype, and the general glibness of some of the school reactions all seem a bit callous, and without nuance.

There is an attempt at depth (and some of the best acting) though the main character, Camille, played by Louise Grinberg. Here the need for such rebellion seems to have roots in her psyche and her family situation. How this effect "spreads" and becomes an easy viral sense of irresponsibility is not given much thought, however. There are three or four other girls who are given some complexity, but not enough to quite explain their motiviations.

Maybe the project was doomed when the writers faced the central problem—this is both about a large effect (over a dozen girls, en masse) and an individual problem (one by one). How to do both? Especially when it happens pretty much simultaneously.

There is a low budget documentary on the real deal—"The Gloucester 18" which is apparently (from their press kit) a kind of public service piece against teen pregnancy— and there is a TV series in Spanish called "El Pacto" that supposedly expands on the sensational aspects of the story. I'm not sure any of it is worth the trouble more than just reading a new article about the phenomenon. The movie here is curious at first, slow to get going, and has a few interesting moments, but it hardly holds up over an hour and a half.

It just plain and boring, the plot is basically nonexistent and they lost an opportunity to treat such an important theme.

They show this group of teen that decides to get pregnant without giving a valid explanation and without considering the psychology of the characters which is really important in this situations: we barely get any emotional responses from the girls, almost no reaction from the parents and the fathers just seem to not exist.

They even had the chance to evolve the character of florénce but they totally wasted it, she needed attention in almost a pathological way and everybody seemed to hate her and we don't even get a full chance to understand why.

The only good thing is the end where they treat an important theme even if superficially.

I feel like they wasted an opportunity.

The first thing of note here is the quality of the acting and direction. The way everything is natural and believable here is mind boggling. These are very young girls and yet they're caught on film doing things we've all seen young girls do as if the camera were invisible. How is that possible? Because if they're only acting they are incredibly convincing.

If I were a director filming a competing film about female adolescents I would shoot myself out of sheer envy. And I'm afraid I can only attribute the poor reviews this film got to something similar. I much prefer a different more masculine kind of film, but I was riveted by this film's persuasiveness. That's quite a trick. This director is ingenious. If he or she is not given some meaty project after this masterful accomplishment then I'm quite sure the movie industry is dooming itself to deliberate mediocrity.

The only caveat I have is that the story itself, in the end, is not very satisfying. However, as I understand it, the true story behind this fanciful embellishment was even less satisfying. In other words this movie is a flight of imagination on pretty slim facts. But don't let that stop you from seeing it, it's unforgettable.