Elles... Les filles du Plessis (2016)

The film opens with Jacqueline being interrogated in a police station room, surrounded by detectives. Despite the police officers’ tone toward the sixteen-year-old girl, she is in fact a victim who has come to file a complaint against her neighbor after he raped her. According to the commissioner, the girl needs protection and should be sent to a home for girls. The film then introduces Brigitte, another young girl who has been summoned to the principal’s office at her school for what seem to be behavioral problems. Her mother and stepfather are in the office, and the stepfather does not hesitate to hit her while her mother and the principal look on indifferently. In fact, she is pregnant, and her family has also decided to have her “placed.” Finally, the film introduces a third girl, named Marie-France, apparently from a respectable family. She comes straight to the girls’ home because she is pregnant and can no longer continue her high-school studies (she has in fact been expelled), despite being just one year away from taking her baccalaureate exams. Her father drops her off, gives her some money, and leaves her at the home. The institution takes in pregnant underage girls in situations similar to those of the three girls introduced at the beginning of the film. Each room in the institution has four beds. Fate thus brings Jacqueline, Brigitte, and Marie-France together. The fourth girl in their room is named Claude, a thirteen-year-old of mixed-race parentage from the island of Réunion, who is pregnant by her father, who raped her... The institution’s director is an authoritarian woman who does not seem to understand the despair of the girls living there. Guided by a morality that was outdated even at the time (the film is set in the early 1970s), this bourgeois-looking woman makes guilt-inducing speeches and considers the girls’ misconduct to be what has led them to be cast out by society. Although the home is not a prison, the girls are subjected to a very strict regime, including pink uniforms, limited hours outside, and training that has little or nothing to do with their abilities. Dominique, the director’s assistant, who replaces her in the evenings and at night, seems more cheerful. This young woman tries to be close to the residents because she is active in the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF), much to the director’s dismay. Events take a dramatic turn when young Claude loses her baby shortly after being taken to the hospital. After returning to the home, she kills herself by jumping from the window of the director’s upstairs office because she does not want to go back to her father. Not knowing exactly what has happened, and unaware of where Claude has gone, the girls at the home decide to protest their dissatisfaction, with Marie-France as their leader and spokesperson. First they march in the street, then they decide to begin a hunger strike. The outraged director threatens them with the worst reprisals, but the residents do not give in. They have two allies within the institution. One is Aimé, the institution’s handyman, who is very devout but also very compassionate and does everything he can to help the girls discreetly. He is the one who informs the residents of Claude’s death, which the director had managed to conceal. The other is Dominique, who, despite being fired by the director, decides to bring her friends from the MLF as well as journalists to help the young mothers and make their living conditions known throughout France. Jacqueline, meanwhile, wins her case against her rapist, who receives a prison sentence with no suspension—a rare outcome at the time. Thanks to this good news, and despite the director’s efforts to stop the girls from denouncing their conditions, they win their struggle. The French government overturns the policies that required girls to be expelled from high schools as soon as the administration discovered they were pregnant, and provides pregnant minors with the means to decide what they want to do with their baby: give it up for adoption or keep it. Jacqueline returns to her parents, Marie-France is reunited with her lover, the father of her child, and Brigitte will try to find happiness...