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The Dardenne brothers\u2019 new film, Young Mothers<\/i>, opens at a\u00a0bus station, one of the unlovely and liminal spaces where their dramas, including Rosetta<\/i>, tend to unfold; we\u2019re in the company of another young girl with baby-fat cheeks, rabbity eyes, and coiled nerves, but soon, a\u00a0slight downward tilt of the handheld camera reveals that Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is pregnant, her belly all out of proportion with her scrawny frame. Jessica, whose little girl Alba is due in a\u00a0few weeks, is the newest arrival at a\u00a0group home for teenage mothers outside the Dardenne brothers\u2019 native Liege. There, they change and wash and feed their infants under the watchful eye of nurses and social workers who step in when they become too flighty or frightened to let the maternal instinct take over; they take it in turn to cook group meals, and sign out at the front desk when they\u2019re ready to return part-time to education or trade school.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They receive counselling and legal support as they embark upon life as a\u00a0mother, alone or with the support of a\u00a0boyfriend or extended family, or else choose to place the baby in foster care, as many of them are considering\u2009\u2014\u2009it\u2019s this dilemma which shapes the narrative arc of the Dardennes\u2019 new film, and rhymes earlier ones, particularly their other Palme winner L\u2019Enfant<\/i>, in which the purity of parental love is tested against the cruelties of a\u00a0transactional society.\u00a0<\/p>\n Jessica wants to meet her birth mother, who placed her into foster care as a\u00a0teenager; she\u2019s wants to love her Alba, but fears she\u2019s too damaged to do so. Julie (Elsa Houben), first seen as the home\u2019s most experienced resident and an example to the other teens, is about to marry her daughter\u2019s doting father Dylan (Jef Jacobs), but, as a\u00a0recovering addict, the prospect of her impending independence triggers panic attacks and a\u00a0fear of relapsing. Perla\u2019s (Lucie Laruelle) baby daddy is in the picture, too, and she wants to play house with him, maybe more than she wants to be a\u00a0mother, despite his evident fecklessness. Both Perla and Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan) are the daughters of alcoholics; Ariane\u2019s mom is in the picture, and has made up a\u00a0nursery in her shabby flat, but Ariane isn\u2019t sure she wants to bring her baby into a\u00a0home with mum\u2019s abusive partner.<\/p>\n These stories are all dripping with emotion\u2009\u2014\u2009there are mother-daughter fights with things said that can never be taken back; there are moments of shocking callousness when characters simply turn their back on a\u00a0family member; equally, there is great tenderness or boundless sadness pouring forth from the smallest moments, like when Julie, riding on the back of Dylan\u2019s moped, warms her hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, or when Jessica asks her birth mother for a\u00a0photograph, so she can show it to her daughter some day. This is what the Dardennes can do: overwhelm us with the enormity of our obligation to one another.<\/p>\n Any one of the young mothers, whose lives offer intimate and sympathetic views of proletariat problems, could have been the central figure in a\u00a0Dardennes film\u2009\u2014\u2009the brothers had originally planned a\u00a0movie around an early conception of the Jessica character, but were so taken with what they found in their research that they conceived a\u00a0sort of baton-pass narrative to allow them to tell more stories. Alas, it\u2019s a\u00a0shame they did so. A\u00a0classic Dardennes film is first and foremost a\u00a0process, in which the verit\u00e9 camera follows a\u00a0figure traversing a\u00a0recognisably frayed and tatty modern-day Belgium. They are in constant contact with the world, and each small step on their journey, from shopping for their family to negotiating with a\u00a0bureaucrat to caressing or cursing a\u00a0friend, is an impression left behind by\u00a0it. In this way we see, with an uncommon particularity, the social factors and personal foibles that contribute to straitened circumstances and desperate choices. There\u2019s too little of this in Young Mothers<\/i>\u2009\u2014\u2009we learn about apprenticeship schemes and deposits for landlords, but not the complications that can bend a\u00a0life off-course.\u00a0<\/p>\n There are few interactions or disagreements revealing different class or life backgrounds between the mothers and the staff and administration of the home, the benevolence of which is unquestioned\u2009\u2014\u2009uncharacteristically, the Dardennes find very few holes in the social safety net. The stories, each given a\u00a0quarter of the movie, are so compressed that supporting characters are reduced to heroes and villains. There\u2019s pathos here\u2009\u2014\u2009so much pathos\u2009\u2014\u2009as these girls struggle to do right by themselves and their babies, together or separately, with or without family support. The film got me good in the final minutes, as one of them writes a\u00a0letter to her daughter, to be opened when she turns 18<\/span> (\u201cthree years older than I\u00a0am now\u201d). With a\u00a0pink pen, in a\u00a0girlishly looping cursive script, she writes the date of her daughter\u2019s 18<\/span>th<\/sup> birthday, pausing to do the math in her head before writing the year:\u00a02042<\/span>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then she runs off to catch the bus to school. It\u2019s enormously affecting\u2009\u2014\u2009so much here is, and the Dardennes\u2019 project, with its material rigour and spiritual conscience, remains important beyond the vagaries of festival-circuit fashion that seems to have moved on from their brand of humanism. After so many punishing stories, most recently 2022<\/span>\u200b\u2019<\/span>s Tori and Lokita<\/i>, it\u2019s hard to begrudge them the raw sentiment and mostly happy, hopeful endings of their newest one. But it comes too easy, in a\u00a0film so artfully and opportunistically structured, which jumps from dramatic peak to dramatic peak as if skipping tracks on an\u00a0album.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\nGet more Little White\u00a0Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n