Strike!

New England, 1963. A private school for girls. The students have built an order of their own: a secret society, their own rules and a solidarity that works inside the school. Then the news comes: because of money the school is to be merged with the boys' school nearby. The administration presents this as an opportunity. The girls oppose it and make a plan to save the school. Sarah Kernochan writes and directs. Kirsten Dunst, Gaby Hoffmann, Rachael Leigh Cook, Tom Guiry and Vincent Kartheiser are in the cast, with Lynn Redgrave as the headmistress. Kernochan is also a documentary maker and won an Academy Award for Marjoe in 1972. The subject is not resistance to a merger but the loss of the space the girls have built among themselves. The film does not make the boys' school a villain; the matter is set out not as an argument about coeducation but as a question of whose terms everyone will live by. Its own distribution story is odd. It circulated under more than one title and never got a proper release, so it went unseen for a long time and found its audience later. The concerns of young women at the start of the sixties are directly present: sex, weight, the fear of pregnancy and the question of what one will become. Who it is for: viewers who like the youth films of the nineties and period comedy. Who it is not for: the narrative is light, there are many characters and some stay thin, and the ending ties up easily.