The Dardenne brothers' social-realist drama Young Mothers follows five adolescent mothers living together at a maternal support home in Belgium. From drug addiction to precarious living situations, these women must face the challenges of their situation individually, but living together in this communal home gives them the tools, support and the community they need in order to do so.
The Garden Cinema View:
The Dardennes Brothers return with another typically well observed helping of social realism. Young Mothers is at once almost immediately recognisable as classic Dardennes, whilst feeling like a slight departure. The home for teenage mums at the centre of the film acts as a springboard to tell five individual stories of hardship and triumph faced by the film’s young protagonists. The intense, and sometimes suffocating, focus of the directors' usual single issue/character studies is somewhat dispersed by this structure. And while the film isn’t always an easy watch, this anthology-adjacent structure gives the audience more breathing room, and a little more head space to consider the issues at play. Now nearly 30 years on from their Cannes breakthrough The Promise, the brothers’ filmmaking remains as tender and intelligent as ever.
