For the Dardenne brothers, “social conditions” come down to the common denominator of cold cash – having it, lacking it, getting it, some disposing of it more than others. It’s a CPA’s version of Karl Marx.
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Once taking the Paris metro I sat across from a young girl – girl as in about 14 – holding an infant in her arms, and when it started bawling she nonchalantly pulled down the neckline of her top and began nursing. “A baby with a baby,” I thought, a bit too flippantly. A girlfriend was sitting next to her, and they chatted amiably as middle-schoolers do. I asked myself about her life, her hardships, and her future. The Dardenne brothers’ latest film, Jeunes Mères, which won the best screenplay award at this year’s Cannes festival, helps answer these questions.
Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have long specialized in social films that have won widespread acclaim. They would seem to own the Cannes film festival: Their breakout Rosetta won the 1999 Palme D’Or, and they won it again for L’Enfant (2005). Lorna’s Silence (2008) won the Best Screenplay award. The Kid with the Bike won the Grand Prix in 2011. Young Ahmed garnered the festival’s Best Director prize in 2019. To top it off, Tori and Lokita won the special 75th Anniversary Prize in 2022. Aside from Cannes, they have won nominations at the Golden Globes (Best Foreign Language Film) and the Oscars (Best Actress). They have also earned several Magritte Award nominations and prizes in their own country.
The brothers often deal with young characters. Their double focus is coldly objective regarding the dire conditions in a wealthy European country (and site of the European Union’s capital) and warmly empathetic toward their underprivileged protagonists. Here they deal with groups of characters, in the style of Robert Altman, the majority of them women. Most of these “women” are in their mid-to-late teens. They’re either pregnant or have recently given birth, and are staying at a center that prepares them to either keep their newborns or put them up for adoption.
Jeunes Mères focuses on five girls as they deal with their predicament. The directors film at close range, close-up or medium-close, so that while we’re not exactly in the heads of the characters we feel plunged into their situations. The filming is so assured, the images so spot-on, we know we’re in the hands of master filmmakers from the get-go. As the camera follows each of the girls, in the center of the nondescript Belgian town where it’s located (actually Banneux, in Wallonia), we feel more like witnesses than moviegoers.
A prime directive for the center’s staff is that while they assist the mothers and mothers-to-be, they don’t replace them or do their work for them. But basic things can be too much for the occasionally overwhelmed girls – even feeding a baby can be exasperating, and the staff must take over. The problems confronting them vary. One pregnant girl, Jessica (Babette Verbeek), who’s determined to keep her baby, is also determined to know why her own mother put her up for adoption. She’s obtained her name and tries to make contact. Unfortunately, “Why did you abandon me?” isn’t the best way to start a mother-daughter relationship years after the fact.
Perla (Lucie Laruelle), an adolescent of African descent traumatized by her upbringing, wants to set up house with her child’s father and tries futilely to find an apartment to rent. However, the boy – he looks to be 15 – is obviously too young for a domestic scene. In addition, he seems to be a feckless, even callous sort who hasn’t even told his mother about the baby. Perla bribes him with purchases of drugs just to get him to see her. The film emphasizes that it took two – or even more – to get to the present situation, and that the babies may be repeating the vicious (or rather, heartbreaking) cycle.
Ariane (Janaina Halloy) has decided to put her baby girl up for adoption by an upper-middle-class couple. Her own mother, indigent, alcoholic, abusive, and given to rages, wants her to keep the baby out of selfish neediness. It’s easy to scorn this basket case, but Ariane tells her that she’s not ashamed of her – that she simply wants decent material conditions for her child rather than dire poverty and dysfunction. She meets the adoptive parents and makes the husband promise to introduce the girl to music. Part of us feels that it’s all for the best that the baby will be with “nice people,” but Ariane herself is clear that it’s a question of money. For the Dardenne brothers, “social conditions” come down to the common denominator of cold cash – having it, lacking it, getting it, some disposing of it more than others. It’s a CPA’s version of Karl Marx.
Julie (Elsa Houben) seems set for a conventional outcome, as she and her boyfriend plan to get married and settle down to a normal existence. He has a decent job, and she’s taking classes. They manage to get the apartment that eludes Perla, but all this almost goes for naught as Julie suffers from devastating anxiety attacks. Perhaps it’s postpartum depression, the “baby blues.” Or perhaps there are family issues: She’s the only one who doesn’t seem to have any family at hand – even Perla has an older sister. For the wedding, Julie’s kindly former teacher has been recruited as a witness.
Naïma (Samia Hilmi) isn’t in the film for very long. She’s of North African stock, but the directors decline to explore the complications of single motherhood in a Muslim household. Instead, she announces cheerfully at a going-away party that she’s going back to her family and has been hired for a job. There are applause and smiles, but the presumptive happy end seems facile.
The other stories are anything but facile. They raise difficult questions. The girls are often asked why they didn’t abort. One wonders: Yes, so why didn’t you? Curiously, no one mentions contraception. Also, no one questions whether the girls (and their boyfriends) were too young for an adult relationship. The answer is on their faces: The heart wants what it wants, and they assume the consequences, which is why they’re in the center in the first place.
The center not only shelters and assists the girls but also encourages their maturation process. The professionals in charge, all women, provide a kind of mentorship obviously lacking at home. The social bonds the girls form with each other are just as important. They cook their own food, wash their own clothes (in coin-operated machines), and fill in for each other if someone has a pressing matter to deal with. Where the traditional family has broken down, social services and NGOs have stepped in. A question the film implicitly poses: If these are stripped of funding, will the old-fashioned family somehow resurrect itself?
The Dardennes’ aesthetic invites comparisons to other practitioners of le film social. Yet these various filmmakers are unique not only in their style and vision but also their place within a particular cultural tradition. The empathy and predominance of the actor bring to mind Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, but the British directors’ humanistic humor and poetry of the everyday derive from the poetic tradition of Chaucer (among others). One doesn’t really laugh during Jeunes Mères (or other Dardenne movies). In France, Robert Guédiguian’s sentimental earthiness is in the line of fellow Midi director and writer Marcel Pagnol. On the other hand, Jacques Audiard (Emilia Perez) descends from the social melodrama of Victor Hugo and even Alexandre Dumas. In the US, a socially conscious TV series like Severance follows the gothic example of Poe, as well as a general American tendency to turn social ills into mass entertainment.
In their lucid realism, compassionate but dour, the Dardennes’ films recall Flemish painting (though they are French-speaking Walloons). Not as profoundly probing of character as a Rembrandt (who is?), their camera closes in on their people to convey imprints of personality and occasional epiphanies of something deeper. Painters like Rembrandt, van Dyck, Van Eyck, aren’t overtly “social,” but they do embed their subjects in a realistic context. While the Dardenne brothers are more politically inclined, they too vividly situate their characters: the young mothers in the center, Perla visiting the establishment where her sister works, Ariane in the contrasting homes of her mother and the adoptive parents, Jessica at her mother’s workplace, Julie with her teacher at the piano. Although the Dardennes adopt an Altmanesque narrative approach in Jeunes Mères, it doesn’t have the epic quality of Nashville or Short Cuts. Like the works of the great Flemish painters, Jeunes Mères maintains an intimate tone throughout.
The directors balance the narrative threads well, and the film moves at a brisk pace. In the end they tie up the threads almost too neatly, though never mawkishly. Yet Jeunes Mères isn’t a downer, either. The film doesn’t give us much backstory (when Jessica finally gets some from her mother, it’s rather thin). The emphasis is on the future. We realize that the center is like a womb, that the girls are not only mothers but will themselves be reborn as whole persons – as adult women. For the older characters it’s too late, though they survive in their way. We come away feeling that Jessica, Naïma, Julie, Ariane, Jessica and their babies, will not only survive but may even thrive – with a little help from their friends.
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All images are by photographer Christine Plenus, with her kind permission.
