17 Girls


17 Girls is a 2011 French comedy-drama film about 17 teenage girls who make a pregnancy pact. The film was screened at the 2011 Montreal World Film Festival and the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. 17 Girls is based on the alleged pregnancy pact that took place at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts in 2008.
The 2010 American film The Pregnancy Pact is based on the same story.

Plot

In Lorient, 17 teenage girls from the same high school make an unexpected decision, incomprehensible to the boys and adults. They decide to get pregnant at the same time. Camille lives alone with her mother who is overwhelmed by her work. She becomes pregnant after a condom problem with a sexual partner who is not her boyfriend. She is the first to discover a positive pregnancy test.
She wants to keep her child, which will convince the others to become pregnant and they can all raise their children together. These girls do not want to comply with the traditional code of conduct and just want to "give the love they have to a baby." Emancipation, is the keyword of these girls who build a plan to no longer be reflections of their parents. "We will be only 16 years apart from our kids, this is ideal. We will be closer in age, no clash of generations!" They decide to educate their future children together in the form of a "hippie community."
In the end, Camille loses her baby after a minor traffic accident. She and her mother leave town without telling anyone where they've gone. The other girls have their babies, but they do not form a "community." One girl is miserable as a young unwed mother and seems to regret her decision to have a child so young, another girl had to dropout of school and work long hours in a dead-end minimum wage job to support her child, another girl decides to give her child up for adoption to a more affluent couple from Paris, and another has her baby with the help and support of her parents who will help raise the kid while she finishes high school and later studies at college.

Cast

likened 17 Girls to The Virgin Suicides by Sofia Coppola saying "same languid pop, same delicately grainy picture, same kind of heterogeneous female cast, same absence of boys, reduced to the roles of stooges".

Awards and nominations