“Young Mothers,” set in Liège, Belgium, is a remarkable fiction film about five teenage women living in a maternity home with their newborns, or with babies on the way. Winner of the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival, it opens up the lives of these women with startling immediacy.
The co-writer-directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, are renowned for their naturalistic approach to the everyday, working-class experience. The women, most of them played by actors with limited theatrical training, are portrayed without condescension. The film could easily have turned into a sob fest, or a species of reality TV show. Instead, it is graced with a garland of human moments about the vicissitudes of motherhood, without a trace of melodramatics.
The Dardennes have traditionally focused their attentions on a single protagonist. (“Two Days, One Night,” with Marion Cotillard, about a woman desperate to keep her job at a solar-panel factory, is my favorite of their films. It’s also one of the few starring a well-known actor.) In “Young Mothers,” by contrast, the directors crosscut between the lives of these five women, and it takes a while to get our bearings.
Why We Wrote This
Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne veer away from easy solutions to the challenges their “Young Mothers” face, while holding room for growth and change.
Jessica (played by Babette Verbeek), whom we meet first, is heavily pregnant and frantically attempting to locate the biological mother (India Hair) who abandoned her at birth. Perla (Lucie Laruelle) fears that, with her wayward boyfriend (Günter Duret) newly released from juvenile detention, she will lose him and become a single mother. She is willing to put the baby up for adoption to keep him.
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Ariane (Janaina Halloy) is committed to giving up her baby, even though her mother (Christelle Cornil), who has been living with a physically abusive man, pleads to adopt the baby herself. Julie (Elsa Houben), struggles with sobriety, as does her doting boyfriend Dylan (Jef Jacobs). But they truly love each other and long to live as parents in a place they can call their own.
The fifth young mother, Naïma (Samia Hilmi), is proud of her new job as a train conductor. She does not figure largely in the movie except as a kind of inspiration to the others that they, too, can break free of their past.
With all this agitation on display, you might think “Young Mothers” would be a conglomeration of sorrow. But what is revivifying about the movie is that these women, none of whom considered abortion, are each, in their own way, aching to achieve a better life. For some, that means coming to terms with their origins. The reason Jessica is so focused on meeting her birth mother is because she needs to know why she was, in her view, discarded. Like many of the others, she wants to unlock her past so she can salvage her future.
To the Dardennes’ immense credit, their film is not about villains and victims. Neither is the narrative sugarcoated. When Jessica holds her newborn in her arms, she says, “I feel nothing. I wish I did.” Jessica’s mother, when she finally agrees to meet with her, reveals her own hurts: If she had kept her baby, she says, she would have felt shamed in her conservative community as a single mother.
Ariane, because of the dangerousness of her mother’s lifestyle, seems entirely principled in giving up her baby for adoption, even though the sadness for all concerned is palpable. Perla, initially rejected by her own sister (Joely Mbundu), is bereft. But she bonds with her baby in a way that raises her up. Julie and Dylan hold fast to the dream of a better life. She wants to be hairdresser, he a baker. They have their eye on a modest apartment.
The crosscutting between the stories occasionally fragments the movie and loosens its power. And the Dardennes’ mobile camera and exclusive use of natural light is sometimes indistinguishable from what often passes for docudrama-style “realism.”
What rescues the film from such an undue comparison is the quality of empathy on view. What happens feels true, not judgmental. Its conclusion, which could have been pat, or despairing, is instead, of all things, hopeful. There is no fake uplift. The uncertainty about the future is still very much there. But so, also, is the exhilaration of knowing that, for these women, the challenges of motherhood – of life – represent a bright beacon.
“Young Mothers” has not received an MPAA rating. It deals with mature themes such as teenage pregnancy and addiction, and contains profanity, scenes of substance use, and intense situations. The film is in French with English subtitles.
