The Belgian filmmaking brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, extend their usually focused attention on a single troubled individual in their realistic style to take in a quartet of teenage mothers who are in the early stages of coping with their unplanned situations. The setting is a shelter for young mothers in the town of Liége, where the residents are given common sense advice and dosed with tough love for the maternal journey ahead—or not, as the case may be. At least one of the girls is seriously considering giving up her newborn child for adoption, while another is having second thoughts when she finally figures out that the father isn’t really into settling down and being a father. We’ve heard these stories before, and the Dardennes’ purpose seems to be that they are universal for a reason. By juxtaposing them all within the same movie framework and somehow making them work against one another, they endeavor to present a provocative analysis of how such dilemmas are timeless and insoluble owing to the vicissitudes of individual will and character. The best thing society can do to make these girls’ choices easier is to not prejudge them and simply try to understand.

Fifteen-year-old Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), the aforementioned girl who is considering adoption, has a compelling reason for that decision: Her mother (Christelle Cornil), who desperately wants her to keep the girl (“We can raise it together”), is an alcoholic prone to abusive relationships . In fact, it turns out that the mother talked Ariane into not undergoing an abortion, and now Ariane fears she has brought another child into a world that will only destroy her, just as it almost destroyed her. In contrast, Jessica (Babette Verbeek), who looks even younger than Ariane and is still pregnant when the film opens, plans to keep her baby because she herself was given up for adoption as an infant and refuses to leave her child to the same fate. She spends most of the movie stalking her birth mother, Morgane (India Hair), who initially is adamant about the choice she made as a teenager as well as her refusal to commune with either Jessica or her soon-to-be-granddaughter. Perla (Lucie Laruelle), the child of a broken African immigrant family, is also bent on keeping her son but for a different reason. She believes the child binds her to his father, Robin (Günter Duret), who has just been released from juvenile detention and from the get-go seems disinterested in the boy. (His first question is whether Perla has brought a spliff for him) Deluded by a connubial fantasy, Perla spends most of the movie figuring out that Robin will not be there for her or the boy, during which time we learn of the extent of the abuse she suffered at the hand of her own mother as she recalibrates her emotional compass while almost losing her child to the system. The oldest of the mothers, Julie (Elsa Houben), is in a loving, stable relationship with Dylan (Jef Jacobs), a fellow recovering addict who really is set on settling down, but Julie’s lingering self-esteem problems threaten to drive her back into drug use. 

There’s a fifth example, Naïma (Samia Hilmi), a girl who has been exiled from her Muslim family for choosing to live as a single mother—when we meet her she has already secured a good job and an apartment through the public welfare department and is leaving the shelter—and it would have been interesting, given the cultural aspects of her circumstances, had the Dardennes followed her as closely as they did the others (for one thing, her mother seems to have come around to her decision). Perhaps the brothers weren’t confident enough in their own objectivity to explore her world as thoroughly as they did the other girls’. As it stands, Young Mothers is one of their most moving, honest, and edifying films, which is saying a lot.

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

Young Mothers home page in Japanese

photo (c) Les Films du Fleuve – Archipel 35 – The Reunion – France 2 Cinema – Be Tv & Orange – Proximus – RTBF (Television belge)/Christine Plenus