Strike

It’s 1963, and the pupils at Miss Godard’s Prep School for Girls are dismayed when they find out they’re merging with a boy’s school – solely for financial reasons. Imaginations run wild as the girls start a brilliant and hilarious anti-merger campaign which culminates in a monstrous school dance – boys will be pigs. Writer-Director Sarah Kernochan has put her own girls’-school 60s past into the film: ‘Glenn Close was in my class’, she says. ‘We were both very shy at first, but when we left school we were passionate exhibitionists.’ Behind the bright and riotous surface of good, unclean high-school fun, her film energetically deals with early feminism, gender roles, adolescent sexuality, eating disorders and the effects of big money on US schools. The film’s apparently conservative stance against co-education is turned around into a well-grounded, rebellious fight for female teen autonomy. (A.H.)