Young Moth­ers first-look review

The open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of this year’s Cannes Film Fes­ti­val acknowl­edged the recent death, at just 43 years of age, of Émi­lie Dequenne, who won Best Actress for her role as the title char­ac­ter of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s Palme d’Or win­ner Roset­ta, a teenage girl claw­ing her way out of des­per­ate pover­ty with fer­al deter­mi­na­tion and heart­break­ing innocence. 

The broth­ers’ new film, Young Moth­ers, opens at a bus sta­tion, one of the unlove­ly and lim­i­nal spaces where their dra­mas, includ­ing Roset­ta, tend to unfold; we’re in the com­pa­ny of anoth­er young girl with baby-fat cheeks, rab­bity eyes, and coiled nerves, but soon, a slight down­ward tilt of the hand­held cam­era reveals that Jes­si­ca (Babette Ver­beek) is preg­nant, her bel­ly all out of pro­por­tion with her scrawny frame.

Jes­si­ca, whose lit­tle girl Alba is due in a few weeks, is the newest arrival at a group home for teenage moth­ers out­side the Dar­d­enne broth­ers’ native Liege. There, they change and wash and feed their infants under the watch­ful eye of nurs­es and social work­ers who step in when they become too flighty or fright­ened to let the mater­nal instinct take over; they take it in turn to cook group meals, and sign out at the front desk when they’re ready to return part-time to edu­ca­tion or trade school. 

They receive coun­selling and legal sup­port as they embark upon life as a moth­er, alone or with the sup­port of a boyfriend or extend­ed fam­i­ly, or else choose to place the baby in fos­ter care, as many of them are con­sid­er­ing — it’s this dilem­ma which shapes the nar­ra­tive arc of the Dar­d­ennes’ new film, and rhymes ear­li­er ones, par­tic­u­lar­ly their oth­er Palme win­ner L’Enfant, in which the puri­ty of parental love is test­ed against the cru­el­ties of a trans­ac­tion­al society. 

Jes­si­ca wants to meet her birth moth­er, who placed her into fos­ter care as a teenag­er; she’s wants to love her Alba, but fears she’s too dam­aged to do so. Julie (Elsa Houben), first seen as the home’s most expe­ri­enced res­i­dent and an exam­ple to the oth­er teens, is about to mar­ry her daughter’s dot­ing father Dylan (Jef Jacobs), but, as a recov­er­ing addict, the prospect of her impend­ing inde­pen­dence trig­gers pan­ic attacks and a fear of relapsing. 

Perla’s (Lucie Laru­elle) baby dad­dy is in the pic­ture, too, and she wants to play house with him, maybe more than she wants to be a moth­er, despite his evi­dent feck­less­ness. Both Per­la and Ari­ane (Janaina Hal­loy Fokan) are the daugh­ters of alco­holics; Ariane’s mom is in the pic­ture, and has made up a nurs­ery in her shab­by flat, but Ari­ane isn’t sure she wants to bring her baby into a home with mum’s abu­sive partner.

These sto­ries are all drip­ping with emo­tion — there are moth­er-daugh­ter fights with things said that can nev­er be tak­en back; there are moments of shock­ing cal­lous­ness when char­ac­ters sim­ply turn their back on a fam­i­ly mem­ber; equal­ly, there is great ten­der­ness or bound­less sad­ness pour­ing forth from the small­est moments, like when Julie, rid­ing on the back of Dylan’s moped, warms her hands in the pock­ets of his den­im jack­et, or when Jes­si­ca asks her birth moth­er for a pho­to­graph, so she can show it to her daugh­ter some day. This is what the Dar­d­ennes can do: over­whelm us with the enor­mi­ty of our oblig­a­tion to one another.

Any one of the young moth­ers, whose lives offer inti­mate and sym­pa­thet­ic views of pro­le­tari­at prob­lems, could have been the cen­tral fig­ure in a Dar­d­ennes film — the broth­ers had orig­i­nal­ly planned a movie around an ear­ly con­cep­tion of the Jes­si­ca char­ac­ter, but were so tak­en with what they found in their research that they con­ceived a sort of baton-pass nar­ra­tive to allow them to tell more stories. 

Alas, it’s a shame they did so. A clas­sic Dar­d­ennes film is first and fore­most a process, in which the ver­ité cam­era fol­lows a fig­ure tra­vers­ing a recog­nis­ably frayed and tat­ty mod­ern-day Bel­gium. They are in con­stant con­tact with the world, and each small step on their jour­ney, from shop­ping for their fam­i­ly to nego­ti­at­ing with a bureau­crat to caress­ing or curs­ing a friend, is an impres­sion left behind by it. 

In this way we see, with an uncom­mon par­tic­u­lar­i­ty, the social fac­tors and per­son­al foibles that con­tribute to strait­ened cir­cum­stances and des­per­ate choic­es. There’s too lit­tle of this in Young Moth­ers — we learn about appren­tice­ship schemes and deposits for land­lords, but not the com­pli­ca­tions that can bend a life off-course. 

There are few inter­ac­tions or dis­agree­ments reveal­ing dif­fer­ent class or life back­grounds between the moth­ers and the staff and admin­is­tra­tion of the home, the benev­o­lence of which is unques­tioned — unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, the Dar­d­ennes find very few holes in the social safe­ty net. The sto­ries, each giv­en a quar­ter of the movie, are so com­pressed that sup­port­ing char­ac­ters are reduced to heroes and villains.

There’s pathos here — so much pathos — as these girls strug­gle to do right by them­selves and their babies, togeth­er or sep­a­rate­ly, with or with­out fam­i­ly sup­port. The film got me good in the final min­utes, as one of them writes a let­ter to her daugh­ter, to be opened when she turns 18 (“three years old­er than I am now”). With a pink pen, in a girl­ish­ly loop­ing cur­sive script, she writes the date of her daughter’s 18^th birth­day, paus­ing to do the math in her head before writ­ing the year: 2042. 

Then she runs off to catch the bus to school. It’s enor­mous­ly affect­ing — so much here is, and the Dar­d­ennes’ project, with its mate­r­i­al rigour and spir­i­tu­al con­science, remains impor­tant beyond the vagaries of fes­ti­val-cir­cuit fash­ion that seems to have moved on from their brand of human­ism. After so many pun­ish­ing sto­ries, most recent­ly 2022’s Tori and Loki­ta, it’s hard to begrudge them the raw sen­ti­ment and most­ly hap­py, hope­ful end­ings of their newest one. But it comes too easy, in a film so art­ful­ly and oppor­tunis­ti­cal­ly struc­tured, which jumps from dra­mat­ic peak to dra­mat­ic peak as if skip­ping tracks on an album.

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