I can’t think of the last time I saw a film about teenagers in which the female protagonist does not flirt with boys, talk about boys, obsess about boys, dress to attract the attention of boys, or engage in rivalry with another girl over a boy. Can you?

Swedish film A Thousand Times Stronger, directed by Peter Schildt, breaks the mold by delving into issues of gender disparity and the silencing of female voices with a story about a how a Swedish school’s gender-divided status quo is shaken up by the arrival of a new girl who’s been schooled all over the world.

The film, interestingly, is narrated by one of its least vocal characters, 15-year-old Signe, who’s one of those quiet good girls who never makes trouble, never makes bad grades … and never gets noticed by her teachers or her peers. While Signe doesn’t speak up about the gender inequalities that bombard her, she thinks about them plenty, and giving her the role of narrator allows us to hear the perspective of the many quiet, obedient good girls who churn along through a school system that largely ignores and devalues them.

When first we meet Signe, she walks us through the school where she’s spent her entire education, giving us her running commentary on things as they are: These are the cool girls, Mimi and her clique. All they think about is fashion and boys and being popular; being smart is not “cool” if you’re a girl, so Mimi and her friends, even though they aren’t stupid, act as though they’re dumber than the boys so they will be liked.

And we have the cool boys; their role is to judge the girls as pretty or not, acceptable or not, to slough off any undesirable work onto the less popular, quiet girls, and to ensure they are the focal point of attention from their teachers, the girls, and even the female cafeteria workers.

The leader of the pack, Ludde (Mimi’s sometime boyfriend) is a natural born charmer who can talk his way out of anything with a flirty smile and a laugh — a future politician, perhaps? Observing a group of younger girls playing cooperatively, Signe wistfully notes that it wasn’t always this way, that when they were younger they were bold and brave and friendly with each other; now that the teen years are upon them, though, the social order of things has shifted.

The boys sit in judgment of the girls, who array themselves in fine feathers and bright makeup to get their attention. The boys, for their part, garner the girls’ attention both by judging them daily for their physical appearance and by jostling with each other for dominance. The teachers are vaguely aware of the disparity in the school’s social order and complicit in its institution, but shrug it off or half-heartedly attempt to talk to the girls about it — in a way that blames the girls for not speaking up more, and for “allowing” the boys to dominate them. Makes you wonder what they’d say to a victim of date rape.

And then a new girl, Saga, arrives — and everything changes.

Saga is different. She doesn’t wear makeup, or dress to please the boys. She wears whatever suits her, whatever is comfortable. Her hair is casually pulled back or loosely piled on her head. She walks with a confident stride, looks everyone clearly in the eye, stands her ground, speaks up.

She’s utterly guileless — not only does she not follow the unspoken rules of social interaction among the older students, she simply ignores the social order altogether. Because she refuses to accept that “the rules” have any power over her, they don’t. She is what she is, she does what she does, and if she’s not afraid to say to her simpering art teacher, “No, I won’t clean up the boys’ mess. Make them clean it themselves.”

She’s friendly to everyone, a friend to all, regardless of clique or social status. Even Mimi isn’t sure how to handle Saga. She confronts Saga at her locker one day and tries to explain to the new girl how things “are” — that she, Mimi, is the popular girl around here, and if Saga wants to be her friend, she can’t be friends with the “other” girls. Saga responds by blithely telling Mimi she’s everybody’s friend, and that’s the way it is, leaving Mimi, jaw agape, to ponder this turn of events and what it means to her own social status.

Saga’s (male) homeroom teacher takes her aside shortly after her arrival at the school and asks her to help empower the girls, to show them how to speak up and not allow the boys to walk all over them. Saga takes this request to heart. And so the girls begin to stand up for their rights, to raise their voices, to point out inequalities and challenge assumptions and say “No.” And guess what? The boys don’t like it. And neither do the teachers

The characters, other than Saga, are drawn a little blandly and one-dimensionally, and it would have been nice to have a little more showing rather than narrating to give us a better feel for the relationships among the students when they were younger, and how that changed over time. But the young actors do a fine job, and they’re nicely supported by a solid adult cast.

This is the kind of movie for teens I wish you could get made in the United States. A movie where the focus is on girls taking action, girls empowering themselves, girls advocating for change, girls whose lives and thoughts don’t revolve solely around boys, girls who are active protagonists of their own stories, rather than sidebars to stories about boys.

Unfortunately, if A Thousand Times Stronger got remade by an American studio, they’d rename it something like “GirlPower!” (which lends itself really well to the sequels, GirlPower 2! and GirlPower 3D!, not to mention the merchandising!) and cast some Disney or Nickelodeon chicks as Signe and Saga. If Disney did it, they’d get Kenny Ortega to direct it and add some catchy songs and nifty group dance scenes. And Mimi and Saga would fight over Ludde, of course, because there has to be romance and cute boys to squeal over, right? That’s what teen girls really want.

Sigh.

I’d love for someone to prove me wrong, and make an American film for the teen market with no love interest angle at all . But I’m not holding my breath.

P.S. Psssst. Geena Davis, who’s been a strong voice on gender issues for a while now, would be a great lead to produce or direct a project that espouses the values her foundation supports. Pass it on.

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