Joseph Sullivan, principal of the high school in seaside Gloucester, Massachusetts, touched off a media firestorm in June 2004 by telling Time magazine that the large number of pregnant teens at his school that year—17 in a student body of 1,200—was partly attributable to “seven or eight sophomore girls” who had “made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together.” After this “pregnancy pact” went tabloid, Gloucester mayor Carolyn Kirk convened a meeting of school and health officials and announced there was no confirmation of a “blood-oath bond.” Sullivan stood by his story, citing reports from his teachers and a former school nurse at Gloucester High. “The affected children need to be left alone with their parents and families to deal with the consequences of their actions,” Sullivan argued. “I will not speak of this matter again.”
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Plenty of others have. Since then the idea of teenagers banding together as young mothers has generated a documentary (The Gloucester 18), a novel (Barbara Delinsky’s Not My Daughter), a top-rated Lifetime movie (The Pregnancy Pact), and, inevitably, an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Now it’s even traveled across the Atlantic, returning to our shores as 17 Girls, the writing and directing debut of French sisters Delphine and Muriel Coulin (the movie screens this Sunday only as part of Music Box’s Chicago French Film Festival). I haven’t seen any of these other treatments (and I can’t promise you I will), but I can say the Coulin sisters have turned the story into something rather French—not a cautionary tale of society unraveling but a drama of lower-class girls whose sweet sense of sorority blooms into a misguided utopianism. For them pregnancy is power: making their own babies, they can make their own world.
What lured the press to Gloucester originally was a proposal from the school clinic’s medical director and nurse practitioner that condoms be distributed to students; this offended the heavily Catholic community. Set in Lorient, a town on the south coast of Brittany, 17 Girls doesn’t really deal with religion, but the Coulin sisters venture pretty far out into the muddy political waters of teen pregnancy. A school staff meeting over the supposed pregnancy pact quickly fractures into a series of discordant personal opinions, with some teachers taking the side of the girls. “Who are we to judge them?” asks one. “First we must understand their gesture, it’s political.” Eventually the parents discover what’s going on, and a public meeting with the principal turns ugly after the school nurse suggests installing a condom dispenser. “Get them hotel rooms too!” jeers one father. A running joke of the movie is that the girls are unified in their innocence while the adults are divided by their experience.
Directed by Delphine and Muriel Coulin
