“Young Mothers” Is a Gentle Gift from the Dardenne Brothers
Goodness is not hard to find in “Young Mothers.” The film is set in and around a maternity home in Liège where the staff look after their charges, all teen-agers, with tough-minded compassion. Most of the mothers have already given birth, though the first one we meet, Jessica (Babette Verbeek), is in the final days of her pregnancy, which she spends trying to meet with her own biological mother, Morgane (India Hair), who gave her up for adoption years earlier. But Morgane is reluctant, and Jessica’s sense of abandonment, a lifelong wound that has now reopened, flashes into an intensely physical neediness: back at the shelter, she weeps and clings to a care worker, practically biting into the woman’s shoulder.
Jessica intends to raise her daughter—she’s already picked out a name, Alba—partly as a corrective to Morgane’s “dumping” of her: “Not even an animal would do what she did,” she says. But the shelter workers know better, and so do the Dardennes. Their camera will soon alight on Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan), a grave, clear-eyed girl of fifteen who has decided to have her newborn daughter adopted, and knows in her bones that it’s the right thing to do. Her mom, Nathalie (an unnervingly steely Christelle Cornil), disagrees, and urges Ariane to leave the shelter and move back in with her so they can raise the child together. Ariane refuses, and a trip to her mother’s apartment clarifies why: Nathalie is an alcoholic, with a vicious temper and a history of dating violent men. There’s no future there for Ariane, or for her child.
Perla (Lucie Laruelle) takes a more conditional view of her situation: she wants to keep her infant son, Noé, but mainly to hold on to the father, Robin (Günter Duret), who has just been released from juvenile detention. One look at Robin, who accepts a joint from Perla but barely acknowledges the stroller she’s pushing, tells us that family stability is not in the cards. Perla, maddeningly, takes longer to catch on, but her stubborn pursuit of a romantic-domestic fantasy is also proof of the Dardennes’ rigor: realization takes its time, if it comes at all. And, even then, it isn’t always enough. Another young mother, Julie (Elsa Houben), initially seems the most fortunate of the group, as she and her boyfriend, Dylan (Jef Jacobs), are committed to each other and to their little Mia. Yet both parents are recovering addicts, and not even Julie’s awareness of the difficult path ahead can keep her yearning for a fix at bay.
The Dardennes had planned to center the story on just one young mother until they visited a real-life maternity home in Liège and, struck by the range of experiences they encountered, expanded their narrative focus accordingly. (They shot much of “Young Mothers” at the home, with no additional lighting or décor.) The result is something relatively novel for them: a film that juggles four protagonists—five if you count a departing resident, Naïma (Samia Hilmi), though we spend mere minutes in her company, most of them at a farewell lunch where she thanks everyone for helping her get back on her feet. “You showed me,” she says, “there’s no shame in being a single mother.”
I wanted more of Naïma, who comes from a Muslim family, and whose reference to shame—compounded by her description of her relatives’ refusal to see her or her baby daughter—has an obvious cultural dimension. But those struggles remain offscreen; Naïma’s season at the shelter is coming to an end, and the movie, graceful yet pragmatic, knows that not every story here can be told. Perhaps that’s why the Dardennes don’t belabor the dynamics among the mothers themselves, who all get along well enough. We catch stray glimpses of naps, feedings, and meal-prep schedules (a diaper-change disaster might have heightened the realism), and we see the reflexive sternness of the staff—they’re here to guide, not coddle—when a mother shirks her responsibilities. The home is a lively hub of activity, but its solidarity and support go only so far. No wonder the film spends so much time outside the shelter, where the women have to figure things out on their own.
Do these four stories, with their subtle yet strategic variations of attitude and circumstance, smack of a troubling tidiness—a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each pass of the narrative baton? “Young Mothers” won the Dardennes a screenplay prize at Cannes last year, which may only corroborate the charge that their naturalism here feels a touch too scripted. With less time to spend on each story, they lean more on exposition, which doesn’t play to their (or most anyone’s) cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communion with their characters’ unspoken thoughts, but, with the exception of Ariane—Halloy Fokan’s gaze is a killer—we don’t linger with any of them long enough to cultivate that degree of psychological intimacy.
Yet “Young Mothers” holds us all the same: not with the urgency, perhaps, of its predecessors but with an emotional pull as lovely and irresistible as the sudden dawning of a smile on a baby’s face. The Dardennes haven’t made their usual thriller of conscience; they know that their characters have several possible choices, none of them perfect, but more than one of them conceivably right. If the film’s interplay of stories tilts toward the schematic, it also encourages us to look past the straightforward trappings of realism and discern a deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm. One woman kisses her granddaughter for the last time; another meets hers for the first. Ariane asks a pair of adoptive parents to teach her daughter to play an instrument; Julie and Dylan look on, delighted, as their baby hears a dazzling burst of Mozart. The Dardennes, typically allergic to the manipulations of music, here remind us that life is as cyclical as a rondo, and just as swift. Best to spend it, while we still can, with those we love. ♦
