For nearly 50 years, the Dardenne brothers have been faithfully hoeing the same cinematic row; Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make films filled entirely with the kinds of people who generally pass beneath notice: people who struggle to manage their lives, who battle addictions, who are born poor and are likely to die poor. They make these films, moreover, mostly where they live, in the Francophone part of Belgium, casting both actors and non-professionals to work alongside each other and cleaving to an unadorned naturalism. It isn’t exactly cinema verité — they find lyricism in the everyday — but they never try to puzzle us with poetry or impress with cinematic flourishes. Their politics are even plainer. The Dardennes stand with the have-nots. They serve them by telling their stories.
Young Mothers focuses on five very young women living temporarily in a shelter for underage mothers. These narrative strands are drawn from their observations of a real shelter, where they went to research a much simpler story of a teenage mother who cannot bond with the child she thought she wanted. This notional character eventually became Jessica (Babette Verbeek), the first of the five, who knows nothing about her own mother except that she left her to be raised in an orphanage. Two weeks away from giving birth herself, she is grimly determined to find the woman who, she says furiously, treated her worse than any animal could. She cannot imagine rejecting her own child.
Wound into Jessica’s story is that of Perla (Lucie Laruelle), who rushes with her baby to meet her boyfriend Robin (Gunter Duret) the day he is released after two months in juvenile detention. Perla is the alcoholic child of a violent drunk. She imagines a proper home, the two of them walking out with the pram and baby Noe. Robin, understandably, just wants to get stoned. They are heading for a crash, clearly.
Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan), meanwhile, is 15 and grew up in a violent, disordered household with a mother (Christelle Cornil) who now wants to raise her grandchild, somehow erasing the past by getting it right second time around. Ariane’s first instinctive reaction to her mother’s extended hand is to flinch. The last stepfather was also heavy with his hands. She is determined to give her child a better kind of life, with or without her. First of all, she wants a better life for herself.
Julie (Elsa Houben) is the only one of these girls to have a loyal and rather lovely boyfriend, Dylan (Jef Jacobs). They were both heroin addicts. Julie is so terrified of her old life that she can barely bring herself to leave the shelter gates, afraid that she will crack if she sees the local dealer. Naima (Samia Hilmi) is glowing: after her year at the shelter, she has found the job she wants, working on the railways. The girls club together to give her a toy train as a farewell present. She is ready to flourish.
Ranged around the girls are the shelter’s social workers, psychologist, mothercraft nurses and creche workers, giving advice, support and punishment — because these mothers are also children, able to love their babies but not necessarily to take responsibility for them. One moment, a young mother is earnestly learning how to give her baby a bath; the next, she has disappeared for three days, drawn back into the chaos (or squalor) that, for her, has the prickly, easy familiarity of Brer Rabbit’s briar patch. Not that their weaknesses and wobbles get them struck off or expelled: the workers have seen every mistake before. These girls are so young and so traumatized. They are only just learning to live.
If the mix of five stories sounds schematic, it’s true that Young Mothers has the faint flavor of a social policy dossier, with Jessica and her fellow inmates as case studies. There is an even spread of success and failure, of ethnicities and inherited dysfunction, along with a predictable checklist of social problems endemic to deprivation. An alcoholic mother on the one hand; a violent family on another. Here an addiction, there a school refusal. There is one traditional father gravely determined to throw out his erring daughter; one young father’s parents believe the girl was always out to trap him.
To some extent, the Dardennes distract us from this listicle of issues with the skill of old hands used to making unwieldy narratives work. The various story strands are plaited together so neatly as to become a single braid, with an emphasis on how much these lives interlock as the shelter inmates support each other. Ariane listens to Perla’s baby monitor while her friend absconds to find Robin. The girls close ranks and cook for each other when any one of them is too fragile to take her allotted turn in the kitchen.
There is a real depth, too, to the naturalistic dialogue that puts flesh on those case notes’ bones. These girls may be expressive more than articulate — a difficulty in finding words is one of their deprivations — but Julie finds a way to reach inside herself to tell Dylan how she has lied all her life, while Ariane’s single request of a potential foster father — would he please teach her child to play a musical instrument? — is wrenching in its simplicity. They speak the world as they see it, while the care with which they mix bottles or pick up and cuddle their little cubs tells us more that they cannot say.
Through all of this, the Dardennes move their camera in the manner they have honed over decades, swinging it from one face to another without cuts or reverse angles, so we feel as if we were ourselves in every cramped hostel room, looking from one girl to another. Socially engaged cinema of this kind gets a bad rap these days; it is seen as old and tired or, worse still, superior and self-righteous. Not to me, however: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne may be doing exactly the same thing they have always done, but they do it with true hearts.
Title: Young Mothers
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Directors/screenwriters: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Cast: Babette Verbeek, Elsa Houben, Janaina Halloy Fokan, Lucie Laruelle, Samia Hilmi
Sales agent: Goodfellas
Running time: 1 hr 44 mins
