Directors: Luc Dardenne, Jean-Pierre Dardenne
Stars: Lucie Laruelle, Janaïna Halloy Fokan, Elsa Houben
For their latest slice of bleakly cutting Belgian social realism, feted brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre drew inspiration from the lives of teenage girls living in community housing for, yes, young mothers. Instead of turning the camera directly onto the sources for these stories, the Dardennes have dramatised a clutch of tales for this interwoven ensemble piece, flitting between the troubled lives of four young women who, between them, paint a dependably raw portrait of life on the poverty line.
Perla (Lucie Laruelle) insists that her baby Noë be brought up in a traditional family unit, but the immature young father has no interest in settling down just yet, and her history with alcoholism already has her under a watchful eye. Also dealing with recovery from addiction is Julia (Elsa Houben), though she benefits from a more loving support network. Jessica (Babette Verbeek) was a foster child herself and, with her firstborn due in a matter of weeks, sets out to find her own birth mother. Finally, Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan) has decided she’s too young to cope with motherhood and has elected to give her baby up for adoption, but her overbearing and antisocial mother Nathalie (Christelle Cornil) has other ideas.
Rather than approach these stories as an anthology with the community centre as it’s fulcrum, the Dardennes choose to interweave, setting up each mother before cutting between them for a patchwork presentation of neglect, misfortune and all manner of social and bureaucratic failings. Quite by coincidence I happened upon a documentary from the Dominican Republic on MUBI recently, Ramona, which sought not only to listen to select girls from the country’s seeming epidemic of teenage pregnancies, but also to try to understand the culture that seems to generate them.
Young Mothers doesn’t initially seem so interested in questioning the broader reasons for Belgium’s high teen pregnancy rate, favouring instead a series of melodramatic episodes designed to study the failures in human nature that generate rifts between people. It’s not quite the thunderously unsubtle breast-beating of Ken Loach, but the Dardennes are close to his Eurocentric equivalent, and Young Mothers sits comfortably within their body of work continuing such endeavours. The state’s disinterest in the poor is broadly felt, but it’s an amorphous ill, one outside the scope of the scrambled lives that are diarised here.
A couple of familiar faces from projects past litter the peripheries – the aforementioned Cornil; Fabrizio Rongione – but the lion’s share of the material here falls on the shoulders of the relatively untested young women who make up the central quartet. Once again the Dardenne’s show a flair for drawing utterly naturalistic performances out of young actors. Laruelle, Fokan, Verbeek and Houben are uniformly superb, inhabiting characters whose situational complexity suggests each could have been extrapolated for an individual feature in its own right.
Indeed, the potential in each story seems a little underserved by the decision to cram them all into one faux-documentary framework. There’s technically a fifth to their roster – Samia Hilmi as Naïma – but she’s effectively squeezed out of the picture by the coverage of the others. Credit to the Dardennes for generating such richly observed stories for these young women, but the needs of a concise 105-minute indie mean that everyone feels – to greater or lesser degrees – like they’ve been given short shrift.
It’s not all misery, and even when dire straits threaten to bring the whole down to the doldrums, the sense of light and warmth in Benoît Dervaux’s cinematography helps keep Young Mothers from scraping the ground. It’s not just the glow of pregnancy that gives this film it’s fortunate shimmer. There is hope here. The Dardennes – now in their 70s – apply a protective patriarchal sensibility to their young women, filling in for the young men who’re mostly absent from the picture, fleeing responsibility as they’re allowed to. Perhaps it is here, in the film’s negative spaces, that the Dardennes are making their starkest point.
But, by cliff-noting each of the stories on this revolving carousel, it’s also one that proves quite slippery to hold onto and, not a day after watching, I’ve found large portions of it simply clouding out of the memory. A darkly ironic end result for a film about a multi-faceted societal issue that often struggles to garner attention at all.
The Lost Highway Hotel 