Purely Joyful Movie!

Let's be realistic.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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.

Instantaneously, 17 Girls reminds me of the American film The Bling Ring, which centered around a group of spoiled adolescents growing up in Hollywood that would venture out at night and rob celebrity's homes, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of values. Their plans were more than just rob whomever whenever but sporadic, carefully-planned that would take place when the celebrity was out of town, judging by their Twitter feed and social networking activity.The film was immediately criticized for being empty, somewhat superficial, and lacking any real depth, and brief searches for the Coulin sisters' (Delphine and Muriel) 17 Girls has warranted similar criticism. Let me reiterate the reason for the emptiness one more time. 17 Girls is based off another unfathomably true story, revolving around a group of teen girls who made a pact to get pregnant around the same time so they could all deliver at he same time and raise their babies together. This kind of act is empty and stupid, and the Coulin sisters make not attempt to disguise the true stupidity of what these girls did. However, they do make an attempt to justify it, and that is when we have a film.This pact begins when seventeen-year-old Camille (Louise Grinberg) discovers she is pregnant after the condom breaks during sex with her partner. By making the choice to keep the child, despite abortion and adoption being available options, she manages to encourage her friends to also have children and get pregnant. One even resorts to getting impregnated by a twenty-four-year old homeless man.The reason the girls give to justify their pact is their desire to be loved unconditionally and their hunger for companionship. If one were to look closely at the homelives of these girls, one would see nothing but emptiness and sadness, with no real parental guidance or dependency whatsoever. Their parents are barely around to cook and care for them let alone give them moral guidance or help them along in school or in life. The girls resort to getting pregnant as a means of being the parent they never adequately had growing up.Make no mistake, these are shallow and narrow-minded girls and the Coulin sisters dually make note of that. The girls choose to go through with a process that is supposed to be wonderful and quite an emotionally-enriching experience and cheapen it to a spur-of-the-moment impulse that effectively robs it of any and all humanity. However, the Coulin sisters bravely try and justify why the girls did, which is the real uphill battle. Out of all the tabloid stories, the Coulin sisters picked one of the toughest to justify and humanize and the result with 17 Girls is remarkable.I'm somewhat optimistic that one day we'll get a version of "the pregnancy pact" that tries to give an even deeper humanization of the girls involved with the pact. With 17 Girls, we're kind of at arm's length away from the story, never closing in on even one of the girls involved with this pact. However, as stated, the lack of character development only further gives these characters the vapidness they accentuated in real life by doing such an unthinkable act and cheapening what is supposed to be an intimate and massively rewarding experience. I constantly see people (myself included) complaining that movies shortchange their heroes and don't give proper justice to their own character. Here's a film that does perfect justice to its characters and their real-life personalities.Starring: Louise Grinberg. Directed by: Delphine and Muriel Coulin.

Usually I like French movies, and so it is with some disappointment when I write this quick thrashing of "17 Girls" directed by sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin. The storyline and cinematography are standard fare, with some montage grunge/rock music cuts I didn't care for, but the real problem lies with the intended message. Girls in groups, and in general mob mentalities for people, always seems to bring out the depths of stupidity and utter dumbness. So the directors instead of focusing on the pitfalls and problems of what happened show it as an exciting life- shattering bonding event. Indeed they even throw in the last lines of the movie with something to the effect of the girls took power into their own hands to "dream". This is sad and reprehensible drivel. Poverty and over-population are real problems. This sort of thing is exactly why I've heard people bring up the idea of licensed partenthood. Pregnancy is not some game, and it certainly not some feminist statement. How low directors can stoop ...

There's something irrefutably Gallic about this arresting rite-of- passage movie. When social maypole Camille falls pregnant at her French high school, her friends and other hangers-on take it upon themselves to get pregnant too. The film focuses on the girls and the dynamics of their relationships in this novel situation. What's so French about it though is that no-one seems to be able to get to the bottom of why this has come to pass. Despite plenty of dialogue bouncing off the topic the only real causal suggestion comes in the repeated - and silent - sequences of shots which observe the girls' bodies and frame the girls in their provincial bedrooms, staring into space, bored or dreaming. It's like Sofia Coppola's Virgin Suicides, with all the generational disconnect, and birth substituted for death.Dreaming is the key, a word which appears in the poetic pay-off voice-over line at the close. With little on offer in the town, the girls look to create their future for themselves in this radical way. As it is with young people in this country, there is little thought given to the practical ramifications of the birth, the '18 years of sacrifice' that Camille's mother refers to, berating her headstrong daughter. Instead the girls cling do their legal research - how to wrest themselves from parental control and the state's financial obligations - and cling to one another for the rest.It's a well-observed, often touching film in which the Coulin sisters manage a consistent tension. It's the tension of the vacuum around young people making demands for money, which come with too few or too heavy a burden of responsibility attached. I enjoyed the inclusion of Camille's brother, a soldier whose dreams are mortgaged to the state that has sent him to war. In a dreadful, subtle scene we see photos of his mascot teddy, a childish toy, propped up against the guns as if firing them.An absorbing, realist film that would stand up well in a double feature against the melodrama of Romain Gavras' Our Day Will Come (2010). 6/10