Dardenne Brothers poignant maternity drama

The stripped aesthetic principles, compassionate humanism and naturalistic purity in the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make their work unusually coherent. It is easy to be Glib about influential Belgian brothers and to say that you know exactly what you get with a new Dardenne film – much like their realistic social counterpart through the North Sea, Ken Loach, which they started to help produce in 2009. But in anticipation of the form, political trends or the large thematic concerns of a film will not illuminate.

Since their international breakthrough in the 1990s with The promise And RosettaThere has always been the ability to surprise in a Dardenne film. Their last, Young people (Young people), is the most surprising work of filmmakers for years. It offers an emotional access not filtered to the anxieties and hopes of five teenage girls of the vulnerable working class and babies requiring their love and care, often when they can barely take care of themselves.

The project was developed by a visit by the Dardens in a maternal support house near Liège, with the initial goal of developing a story on a young mother who has trouble connecting with her baby. But they were so struck by what they have witnessed – among mothers as well as by nursing, advice and administrative staff – that they have extended their plans to build a multi -characte overall piece.

This alone marks a change for writers-directors, whose work mainly tends to block on one or two main characters. This also allows them to draw even more than usual on their documentary history. Young people is closer to docu-fiction than any of their recent work. He follows the difficulties of four women, including three with newborns and one who is pregnant with an imminent maturity date, plus a fifth whose stay at the refuge approaches his end.

Only two weeks before delivery, Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is waiting in a restless state to a bus stop where she organized herself to meet her biological mother Morgane (India Hair), who abandoned her for adoption when she was younger than her daughter now. Before and after the arrival of her baby, Jessica aspires to understand the reasoning behind the decision of her mother and to know if she felt remorse.

Perla (Lucie Laruelle) gave birth to a son while the boy’s father, Robin (Gunter Duret), was in detention for minors. She brings him a spliff to celebrate his release, but Robin shows little affection for her and barely looks at their child. While Perla signed the refuge for several hours, expecting to spend the day with him, Robin cannot get away with it quickly enough. Perla vanishes on her return, and another young mother, Julie (Elsa Houben), the mass to knead the numbness of her body.

Ariane, fifteen (Janaina Halloy Fokan) wants to put her little daughter with a host family and finish her studies. Her mother Nathalie (Christelle Cornil), who excluded her from having an abortion, is against this plan, insisting that she can help raise the child. But Nathalie is a drunk who had an abusive relationship with a violent man. At first, she was in love to visit by assuring her that she stopped drinking and threw the guy, but there are signs that indicate the opposite. Increasingly impatient with her daughter’s reprimands, Nathalie Claque: “He struck me worse than he hit you.”

Julie and her baby’s sweet father, Dylan (Jef Jacobs), are both drug addicts. They leave their girl in a daycare while they cross the city to see a subsidized apartment where they hope to live with the family. Dylan, apprentice baker, wants to marry him; Their trip to his moped is one of the most beautiful sequences of the film, an image of freedom and happiness that suggests that such a life could be at hand. But there are hiccups.

The reverse are as much part of the realities of these women as their provisional passages, aspiring to prune a better life for themselves and their children. An incentive to continue to try is the success of Naïma (Samia Hilmi), who is preparing to move with her child in her own apartment and is on the right track to ensure a job as a railway tickets. His sending of the refuge, with a cake served outside in the garden, is one of the many solidarity displays.

Others have a more joyful path: Julie relapse in drug use and anxiety attacks; Perla refuses to read the obvious signs that Robin has no interest in setting up with her or becoming a practical father; Jessica continues to hit a wall with her mother and has a hostile meeting with her baby’s antipathic parents, who run what seems to be a successful gym. They demand to know what they want from their son, insisting that she is to blame for her situation because she refused to have the abortion they proposed to pay.

The filmmakers put these stories transparent in a broader image that balances despair with moments that point to caution towards a more stable future. There is never a false note from young actors, who all have deeply moving scenes. But Young people is also captivating when he simply occupies the daily responsibilities of new parenting – food, change of diapers, bath – or when he catches an expression of wonder or joy as a mother looks at the little face of the child she created.

The camera of DP Benoît Dervaux is always attentive, never intrusive or difficult, and the use of the available light adds to the documentary authenticity of the stories.

Perhaps the most magnificent moment of the film occurs when one of the mothers, preparing for the heartbreaking separation of putting his baby with a foster family, attacks the child in a car seat. If you do not melt when you see a happy smile that spreads on the adorable face of the baby and lights your eyes, I suspect that you are a terrible person.

Also attentive that for the severe experiences of characters living naked lives on the sidelines of society, Dardennes have never been fatalists of condemnation.

This aspect is clear in a number of beautiful scenes facing forward – Ariane writing a letter to read to her daughter at the age of 18; Jessica crosses and can contact Morgane when her obstinate determination is paid; Perla fighting with her older half-sister, Angèle (Joly Mbundu), but then reconciling with real warmth and a support offer; And above all, Julie and Dylan taking their baby to visit a former music teacher who helped them both.

Dardennes are not offering easy solutions to the difficulties of their characters. But when the teacher seated the piano to start the introduction of the child to music, “Rondo a la Turca” by Mozart looks like a triumphant resilience and execution hymn.