‘Young Mothers’ Is a Kaleidoscopic Ode to Humanism — and Equal Parts Heartbreaking and Infuriating

In the press notes accompanying “Young Mothers,” a movie by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, there is included a selective timeline of its making. On April 5, 2024, the Belgian brothers noted that “by constructing a long sequence shot . . . we once again observed that [it] is our alexandrine.” Our what? After scuttling across the internet, I learned that the term is peculiar to French poetry, and connotes a line of twelve syllables with a major stress on the sixth syllable. Poets among the Sun’s readership can chip in with their thoughts about how the stray iamb or casual caesura figures into it. The Dardennes describe their alexandrine as a “constraint to find our film, its rhythm.”How familiar are you with the Dardennes? Before sitting down to watch “Young Mothers,” they were on the periphery of my radar–names that rang a distant bell. Critical legwork led to an odd description proffered by a former Village Voice and sometime Tablet critic, J. Hoberman: the Dardennes, he writes, are “worker priests” trading in “a spiritually infused social realism.” If this sounds hard-going, try telling that to the folks at Cannes: the city’s film festival can’t open its doors without seemingly bestowing an award on the Dardennes’ efforts.This critic clearly has some catching up to do, particularly given how absorbing I found “Young Mothers.” Absorbing, but also heartbreaking and often infuriating. The stories the Dardennes glance upon in this ensemble piece are fraught with the conundrums of youth. Self-involvement is primary among them, but so, too, are resilience and, to some extent, forgiveness. If a long sequence is the brothers’ alexandrine, then ping-ponging emotions count as ours. Here is a film that, once seen, is hard to table.Which is likely the reason a wag or two has seen fit to dismiss “Young Mothers” as “misery porn”–as if the responses an audience may have toward a given work of art are somehow cheapened by their immediacy. We should expect something more lasting and resolute than mere sensation, and, in that regard, the Dardennes deliver. They’ve crafted a film whose kaleidoscopic approach to narrative is in sync with an encompassing humanism. Just because the filmmakers err on the side of kindness doesn’t mean they don’t realize how rare it is.Where to begin enumerating a movie that begins in media res? We are plunked down into a facility dedicated to the care and instruction of unmarried teenage girls who have either recently given birth or are on the verge of doing so. The camera, moving with an intimate and informal brevity, parcels out vignettes of successive characters and storylines. Stay the course and the storylines begin to overlap, intersect and coalesce. The Dardennes respect us enough to trust us with some heavy lifting. The pieces are knitted together if, in the end, not altogether completed. The most headstrong of the bunch is Jessica (Babette Verbeek), two weeks away from her due date, and in desperate need of contact with her birth mother. Jessica’s compatriot, Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan), might dissuade her from doing so given how reckless and irresponsible her mother, Nathalie (Christelle Cornil), has proven to be. Naïma (Samia Hilmi) is a Muslim whose circumstances have only just been accepted by her mother, and by her community not at all. When news arrives of Naïma having achieved her dream job as a ticket taker on a commuter train, she serves as a model for her colleagues. The real world, it seems, is navigable.And so it goes as a quintet of young women attempt to locate their footing within circumstances that don’t necessarily augur for the good. The actresses are uniformly excellent with the Dardennes’ documentary-like approach rendering their performances even more naturalistic. “Young Mothers” is a heartening movie about life’s equivocations and the promises that are possible despite them.

‘Young Mothers’ Is a Kaleidoscopic Ode to Humanism — and Equal Parts Heartbreaking and Infuriating

‘Young Mothers’ Is a Kaleidoscopic Ode to Humanism — and Equal Parts Heartbreaking and Infuriating

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