17 Girls (2011)

 

17 Girls (2011)

 

There’s a sociological theory regarding the positive consequences of gossip even if, and perhaps most explicitly if, the gossip story isn’t entirely, factually, correct. The idea is that the gossip serves as moral fables providing a short-hand of acceptable norms, which kind of activism can heal wounds, what sins are to be most quickly forgiven, and which sins will never be. This theory isn’t about the consequences of gossip on its target, but how it shapes the future choices of the listener.

 

I understand the idea, but I don’t buy it. What I do buy is that when these allegedly-true fables of gossip are translated to more-honest fictions, fine things can happen.

 

If you are of a certain age, you’ll remember the story of James Dallas Egbert III; he was the kid who became so obsessed with the “Dungeons and Dragons” RPG that he set up a “real-life” version the game in the steam tunnels beneath his college, descended into delusion, ran away, and killed himself. It was a dramatic story that received a lot of attention in the 1980s but, as it happens, most of the summary I just gave, the version everyone knows, is untrue. Anyway, if you remember it, it’s likely because you, like I, was a fan of RPGs, and you had to endure your parent’s paranoia that you’d land out similarly self-damaging. The false story inspired a lot of hysteria, and helped laid the ground-work for the much more damaging, and even more illusionary, Satanic Ritual Abuse hysteria that empowered the most irrational political forces in this county of that era and destroyed a number of wholly innocent lives. The more recent mythology surrounding QAnon has a more-than passing resemblance to the “Satanic Panic” of three decades ago. But the false story also inspired a pretty good novel by Rona Jaffe, “Mazes and Monsters” (1981), which was adapted into a pretty good film by the same name (1982), and that film established Actor Tom Hanks’ credentials as a leading man.

 

This film, “17 Girls,” has a similar genesis. In 2008 there was a widely reported story that 18 girls at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts entered a “Pregnancy Pact,” that they would become pregnant together without entering into relationships with the babies’ fathers and then leave their parent’s homes and raise the children communally. Again, this story was largely untrue, but it still generated a lot of fictional media -- episodes of the TV crimes shows “Law and Order SVU” and “Bones” (2008 & 2009 respectively); a Lifetime TV docudrama of dubious fidelity to the actual events, “The Pregnancy Pact”; a more straight-forwardly fictional film, “El Pacto”; and a novel, “Not My Daughter” (the last three were all 2010). All these came before this film, and then, after this film, came a documentary that finally endeavored to nail down the actual events, “The Gloucester 18” (2013). Among the dramatized moral fables, “17 Girls” is recognized as the least soap-boxing or sensationalistic.

 

It is set the French town of Lorient, a place as uninspiringly conventional and economically depressed as the Massachusetts’s town of the original true/false story. But Lorient is also a sea-side town, and its drabness is frequently contrasted with lovely scenes at the water’s edge. The scenes by the water feature the younger characters, but don’t picture the town’s adult population, all of whom seem to have lost all taste for life, and that is key to the film’s symbolic language: It is to this shore that the teenagers go and imagine they can still be more than what their parents turned out to be. The sense of place in this film is exquisite, and it is not surprising to learn that the Writers/Directors Delphine and Muriel Coulin, who are sisters, grew up there.

 

Of the 17 girls of the title, the smartest, prettiest, and most popular, is Camille (Louise Grinberg). She finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, and of course gives this circumstance some deep thought, but that thinking seems to casually exclude consideration of either the father of the child or her own mother. She concludes has no reason to worry, or as she tells her friends, "I'll have two lives - one at school and one with the baby. I'll have someone who loves me my whole life, unconditionally." She seems calm and rational, and she’s already admired, so when it seems she’s making bold decisions to take charge of her listless life, all the other girls are in awe of her.

 

Then another girl, Florence (Roxane Duran), who was never much liked, tells Camille that she is also pregnant. Camille embraces this girl, bringing her into her large circle of friends. While they all sit together at a McDonald's, contemplating the choices that the two pregnant girls face, those who aren’t pregnant don’t have any real, adult choices before them, so they all hatch the “Pregnancy Pact” that drives the plot.

 

The films manner is unrushed, naturalistic, and completely without ham-handed manipulations; which is not to say it doesn’t manipulate. If art completely refuses to manipulate, it is not art at all. This film mostly lacks speeches, it chooses to demonstrate through incident, and creates the illusion of withholding judgement, but the as incidents add up and lead the audience to inevitable conclusions (and the fact that all the incidents are invented) demonstrate that the film’s objectivity is an illusion. What the film excels at is making a moral argument without the rhetorical ham-fistedness of the other dramas citing above, or the corrosive moralisms of dishonest gossip.

 

This film is wholly about the girls: the hand-wringing parents and school official are mostly treated dismissively and some with blunt hostility, meanwhile while the boys who impregnated the girls barely appear at all. Moreover, the film is more about the girls collectively than individually, with only Camille, Florence, and somewhat pathetic Clémentine (Yara Pilartz), getting any significant, individual, character development. I guess that’s inevitable in a film with 17 main characters, but the collective identity is not just a pragmatic consequence of economical story-telling, it’s central to the themes and demonstrated in how cinematographer Jean-Louis Vialard frames his shots.

 

Early on, before the plot is full swing, there’s a scene where the camera lingers on Camille, alone in her bedroom, contemplating her uncertain future. Each of the girls are given a similar moment, but for almost all it is just one such shot, then never again. The vast majority of the scenes have them in groups of five or more, and there seems almost always to have at least three crowded into the same frame, because once they made the choice, they never want to be alone. The film-makers deftly trick you into half-accepting the girls’ errors, one those tricks is manipulating of our response to physical beauty. The loveliest landscapes have only young people in them. Camille is the most attractive of the girls by far in no small part because make-up stylist Sylvie Aid made her so, but all the girls are lovely, but their adults, not so much. All their performances are the perfection as they collectively laugh, fight, and cling to each other for dear life.

 

The true/false story on which this film is based should’ve fallen to the wayside based on logical deduction long before it was factually debunked, but it wasn’t. I suspect the Coulins themselves got that it wasn’t literally true, and that effected their approach to realism. But unlike Allison Anders’ “Mi vida loca” (1993), another film project that started with exploring a similar media-driven urban legend, but, to preserve realism, ditched that plot before shooting, Coulins still held to the central myth, the idea of there actually being a “Pact.” It succeeds in creating a sense of realism in the context of the improbabilities because it resolutely refused to use the story as a platform for polemics about sex-ed, access to birth control, etc, and instead focused on what such a pact was a reflection of -- the tyranny of “conventional thinking.”

 

The phrase “conventional thinking” was coined by American Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg to describe one of the earlier stages of an individual’s moral development. He associated it with teenagers struggling to need to fit into a peer group while simultaneously displaying an inability to control their stormy emotions when faced with new, and adult, decisions. These emotions make rational, independent decisions difficult to impossible, so decisions instead mimic the ones put in front of the teen by the person whom the teen most wants the approval of. Often these means accepting social norms preached by adults, but when the adults disappoint, the teens can only turn to each other for the “conventions” they are to follow. A couple of the girls explicitly state that they see having children of their own as a way to make up for their parents’ mistakes in raising them. Given that set-up, it’s no wonder they follow Camille who, though the smartest of the group, says some remarkably dumb things to propagandize this endeavor, for example, she insists sixteen is the perfect age to have a child, because “we’ll understand them – there will be no generation gap.”

 

One girl’s parents throw her out and she’s forced to squat in a decrepit abandoned trailer. Other adult misbehavior is not so extreme, but still seems shrill and counterproductive, even when what they are saying is obviously true. Camille’s overworked single mom (Florence Thomassin) tries to warn her of the “years of sacrifice” raising a child requires, but those years have left her too tired too convincingly demand she be heard. Camille’s older brother, barely fully a man an already without options for the future, struggles to restrain his violent rage when he asks if the unborn child will grow up to be “a soldier boy or an unemployed girl.” In one scene (it sticks out because it does not feature the girls) the school teachers are discussing the pregnancies – as the camera pans slowly 360 degrees around the table, each teacher offers a different theory. The camera never rests on any of them, just as the teachers move from one pontification to the next without coming up with any answers.

 

The camera eye is calm and compassionate as it documents the girl’s naiveté, contradictions, and irresponsibilities. The girls jokingly refer to each other as hippies, and stage an orgy to further the plan (this scene isn’t exploitively sexualized) and a cover version of “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life” from the musical “Hair” (first performed in 1967), but the girl’s rebellion never had the kind of coherent articulation of the earlier generation’s more fully-realized (and failed) counter-culture. In a class room scene, they are shown a film of an actual birth and they avert their eyes and make retching noises. Yes, they read up on the subject of pregnancy, get their ultra-sounds and attend birthing-preparation classes, but even when pregnant, they also smoke and drink alcohol and stay up late partying with boys they feel no connection to and who clearly feel no obligation to them. There’s a scene that is both rich and sweet bonding and cringe-worthy, featuring the girls driving through the night in a “borrowed” car, none of them have a license, and laugh as the sing a pop song about drowning one’s sorrows in “Vodka, chocolate, and heroin” (from the song “The Three Friends” by Constance Verluca (2007)).

 

The most obvious influence the Coulins display from Director Sofia Coppola. Pursuing the illusion of realism, the Coulins couldn’t display Coppola’s bravado, but they capture the tone of her poetics in the set-pieces that set up narrative transitions like a slow a slow-motion underwater montage focusing on the girls' pregnant bellies, or the beach party where a soccer ball rolls though the bonfire and ignites but the young people still continue to kick it around, quite literally playing with fire.

 

It’s after that party that it all unravels. That the girl's bubble would pop was inevitable, how quickly it does is shocking, but does not violate the naturalism that defined rest of the film. That which they could not control intrudes on their utopia, and in an instant, paradise is lost. Critic Marshall Yarbrough nicely summarized the film, “For most of the film the girls are inseparable, together in mind and in purpose. Their bond is a mystery to their protectors and to themselves. The bond fades, but its memory is all the more vivid for that mystery.”

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNK5gLFR8qQ