Goodness is not hard to find in Young Mothers. The film is set in a maternity hospital in and around Liege, where the staff care for their teenage charges with stern compassion. Most of the mothers have already given birth, although the first, Jessica (Babette Verbeek), is in the final days of her pregnancy, which she spends trying to meet her birth mother, Morgana (India Hare), who gave her up for adoption years ago. But Morgana resists, and Jessica's sense of abandonment, a lifelong wound that has now been reopened, develops into acute physical need: back at the shelter, she cries and clings to a care worker, practically biting into the woman's shoulder.
Jessica is determined to raise her daughter—she's already chosen a name, Alba—partly as compensation for Morgana “abandoning” her: “Not even an animal would have done what she did,” she says. But the shelter workers know better, and so do the Dardennes. Soon their camera will focus on Ariana (Janaina Halloy Fokan), a serious, bright-eyed fifteen-year-old girl who has decided to adopt her newborn daughter and knows in her bones that it is the right thing to do. Her mother, Nathalie (a frighteningly stern Christelle Cornille), disagrees and encourages Ariana to leave the orphanage and return to her so they can raise the child together. Ariana refuses, and a trip to her mother's apartment explains why: Natalie is an alcoholic with an angry personality and a history of dating abusive men. There is no future there for Ariana or her child.
Perla (Lucie Laruelle) takes a more tentative view of her situation: she wants to keep her young son Noe, but mainly to keep her father Robin (Gunther Duret), who has just been released from juvenile detention. One look at Robin, who accepts a joint from Pearl but barely notices the stroller she's pushing, tells us that family stability isn't in the cards. Perla, annoyingly, takes longer to settle in, but her insistence on romantic-domestic fantasies is also proof of the Dardennes' rigor: fulfillment takes time, if it comes at all. And even then this is not always enough. Another young mother, Julie (Elsa Houben), initially seems to be the luckiest of the group, as she and her boyfriend Dylan (Jeff Jacobs) are devoted to each other and their little Mia. However, both parents are recovering drug addicts, and even Julie's realization that she has a difficult road ahead cannot deter her desire for recovery.
The Dardennes planned to focus the story on just one young mother until they visited a real maternity hospital in Liège and, struck by the variety of events they encountered, broadened the focus of their narrative accordingly. (They shot most of Young Mothers at home, with no extra lighting or set design.) The result is something relatively new to them: a film that features four main characters—five if you count outgoing resident Naima (Samia Hilmi), although we spend only a few minutes in her company, most of it at a farewell dinner where she thanks everyone for helping her get back on her feet. “You showed me,” she says, “that there is no shame in being a single mother.”
I wanted more about Naima, who comes from a Muslim family and whose references to shame – compounded by her description of her relatives' refusal to see her or her young daughter – have an obvious cultural dimension. But this struggle remains behind the scenes; Naima's season at the orphanage comes to an end, and the film, graceful but pragmatic, knows that not every story can be told here. Perhaps this is why the Dardennes don't pay much attention to the dynamic between the mothers themselves, who all get along quite well. We catch occasional glimpses of sleep, feeding and meal preparation schedules (a diaper-changing disaster might have heightened the realism), and we see the reflexive sternness of the staff—they're there to guide, not coddle—as the mother shirks her responsibilities. The home is a busy hub of activity, but its solidarity and support goes far. It's no surprise that the film spends so much time outside the shelter, where the women are left to figure things out on their own.
Do these four stories, with their subtle but strategic variations in relationships and circumstances, smack of an unsettling precision – a desire to cover as much sociological ground as possible with each movement of the narrative baton? Young Mothers won the Dardenne Screenplay Prize at Cannes last year, which can only lend credence to the claim that its naturalism here feels too scripted. With less time spent on each story, they rely more on exposition, which doesn't play to their (or most others') cinematic strengths. The filmmakers are at their best when they bring us into direct communication with the unspoken thoughts of their characters, but with the exception of Ariana (Halloy Fokan's look is deadly), we don't stick with any of them long enough to develop that degree of psychological intimacy.
And yet “Young Mothers” holds us in the same way: perhaps not with the same urgency as its predecessors, but with an emotional pull as beautiful and irresistible as the sudden appearance of a smile on a child's face. The Dardennes didn't make their usual thriller about conscience; they know that their characters have several possible options, none of which are perfect, but more than one of which is presumably correct. If the film's interplay of stories leans towards the schematic, it also encourages us to look beyond the mere trappings of realism and recognize the deeper structure of rhyme and rhythm. One woman kisses her granddaughter for the last time; another meets her for the first time. Ariana asks a couple of foster parents to teach her daughter how to play a musical instrument; Julie and Dylan watch in delight as their child hears Mozart's dazzling part. The Dardennes, who are usually allergic to musical manipulation, remind us that life is as cyclical as a rondo, and just as fast-paced. It's best to spend them while we still can, with those we love. ♦
