After 3 highly popular fiction films ("Pequeno Dicionário Amoroso", "Amores Possíveis", "Cazuza: O Tempo Não Pára"), director Sandra Werneck returns to the documentary format where she started 3 decades ago. "Meninas" is a portrait of teen pregnancy, a social problem of epidemic proportions in Brazil: in 2005 alone, 628,000 girls under 15 years of age gave birth, according to official data. Werneck chose 4 pregnant teenagers from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and filmed them over a year's period.
Thus, we meet Luana, 15, who helped her mother raise her four younger sisters, and now wants to be a mother herself. Evelin, 13, sexually active since 11, got pregnant by drug dealer boyfriend (we never see his face), who's trying to go straight but is threatened to be killed by his own gang if he ever does. Luana, 14, got pregnant by her 22 year-old boyfriend, Alex, but there are two problems: Alex also got Luana's neighbor, 15 year-old Joice, pregnant; and Luana's single mother, 40, is also expecting. All those girls live in small, poor, overcrowded tenements but they're not rejected or abandoned by their families; on the contrary, they all have the moral and whatever financial support their parents can give them.
These girls have low-standard education but are far from being naive or ignorant: they're pretty much aware about the dangers and delights of sex, about pregnancy prevention methods, condoms, STDs, AIDs, pills. They have social security access to caring doctors and modern medical exams in decent, clean public clinics and hospitals. None of the 4 girls considers abortion, not that they are particularly religious (they aren't), but because teen pregnancy is not an exceptional "accident" in their environment: it's the rule. It's not a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood (most of them lead exactly the same kind of life before and after they give birth). It represents the ephemeral, unrealistic hope of a new beginning, a new life. However, they are in fact perpetuating the ancient cycle of poverty and oppression burdening women of their social class, as they remain "housebound", limited to house chores (cooking, cleaning, nursing) and forced to abandon school to take care of their babies. The fathers' only responsibility is providing them some money -- which they rarely afford to, as most of them are teens themselves, under-employed or unemployed.
Werneck totally concentrates on her protagonists and isn't interested in analyzing the social, political and educational context that leads to this appalling situation. The film's neutral, non-judgmental approach is at times disturbingly cold. But with such dramatic events unfolding, it's impossible to remain indifferent to the girls' stories. 13 year-old Evelin is especially mind-boggling : beautiful, precocious, rebellious, strong-willed, it's shocking to see how her violent and unassisted environment has benumbed her. She tells us with a knock-out smile that whenever she hears bullets flying in the frequent confrontations between traffickers and cops in the favela where she lives, she gets so excited she starts dancing around the house (!!!). Fate turns out to be predictably horrifying for her and her trafficker boyfriend: at 13, this unglamorous Lolita has gone through ordeals of a dozen lifetimes.
Though rather superficial and self-consciously apolitical, "Meninas" is nevertheless mandatory viewing for the depiction of a harsh, urgent, alarming reality that shows no sign of being dealt with responsibly by public or private powers in Brazil -- a reality that is spreading quickly throughout Third World countries and also, isn't it?, in some of the so-called developed ones up North.
Thus, we meet Luana, 15, who helped her mother raise her four younger sisters, and now wants to be a mother herself. Evelin, 13, sexually active since 11, got pregnant by drug dealer boyfriend (we never see his face), who's trying to go straight but is threatened to be killed by his own gang if he ever does. Luana, 14, got pregnant by her 22 year-old boyfriend, Alex, but there are two problems: Alex also got Luana's neighbor, 15 year-old Joice, pregnant; and Luana's single mother, 40, is also expecting. All those girls live in small, poor, overcrowded tenements but they're not rejected or abandoned by their families; on the contrary, they all have the moral and whatever financial support their parents can give them.
These girls have low-standard education but are far from being naive or ignorant: they're pretty much aware about the dangers and delights of sex, about pregnancy prevention methods, condoms, STDs, AIDs, pills. They have social security access to caring doctors and modern medical exams in decent, clean public clinics and hospitals. None of the 4 girls considers abortion, not that they are particularly religious (they aren't), but because teen pregnancy is not an exceptional "accident" in their environment: it's the rule. It's not a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood (most of them lead exactly the same kind of life before and after they give birth). It represents the ephemeral, unrealistic hope of a new beginning, a new life. However, they are in fact perpetuating the ancient cycle of poverty and oppression burdening women of their social class, as they remain "housebound", limited to house chores (cooking, cleaning, nursing) and forced to abandon school to take care of their babies. The fathers' only responsibility is providing them some money -- which they rarely afford to, as most of them are teens themselves, under-employed or unemployed.
Werneck totally concentrates on her protagonists and isn't interested in analyzing the social, political and educational context that leads to this appalling situation. The film's neutral, non-judgmental approach is at times disturbingly cold. But with such dramatic events unfolding, it's impossible to remain indifferent to the girls' stories. 13 year-old Evelin is especially mind-boggling : beautiful, precocious, rebellious, strong-willed, it's shocking to see how her violent and unassisted environment has benumbed her. She tells us with a knock-out smile that whenever she hears bullets flying in the frequent confrontations between traffickers and cops in the favela where she lives, she gets so excited she starts dancing around the house (!!!). Fate turns out to be predictably horrifying for her and her trafficker boyfriend: at 13, this unglamorous Lolita has gone through ordeals of a dozen lifetimes.
Though rather superficial and self-consciously apolitical, "Meninas" is nevertheless mandatory viewing for the depiction of a harsh, urgent, alarming reality that shows no sign of being dealt with responsibly by public or private powers in Brazil -- a reality that is spreading quickly throughout Third World countries and also, isn't it?, in some of the so-called developed ones up North.
