“The Young Mothers’ Home,” the latest film from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, opens on the desperation of a young girl at a bus stop, scanning her surroundings for someone she does not know. Her eagerness alarmingly stands out in this public setting, and we’re not sure she won’t create a scene. It’s an immediately gripping place to start a film that initially seems so directly concerned with the sometimes painful interplay between social roles (or rules) and private emotions. “The Young Mothers’ Home” follows four teenage girls at a shelter in the Dardennes’ native Liege, in Belgium, navigating the new responsibilities of motherhood as well as other problems such as addiction, unsafe families, and trauma, on top of the turmoil typical of their age. It is a shame that the film does not know what to do with this dichotomy between the innocence and self-absorption of childhood, and the requirement that these girls enter public society, other than repeatedly bringing it to our attention.
Where the Dardennes’ films usually find the universal within the specific, their decision to tell four vaguely interlocking stories gives the impression of a lack of confidence with the subject, or perhaps the film responds to documentary trends for polyphonic portraits of women. It is hard indeed not to think here of Claire Simon’s “Our Body”, which explored the life journey of the female body through glimpses at a Paris hospital’s different departments, with various patients’ personal stories forming a rich tapestry. Switch the hospital for this young mother’s center; the similarities are striking. But what the Dardennes gain in relative comprehensiveness — all four girls are on very different paths — they lose in both lyricism and realism, the twin qualities that make their best work soar.
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Sticking to a single character usually allows their films to escape the specificity of their protagonist’s predicament, reaching a higher social and human truth. In “The Young Mothers’ Home”, the Dardennes seek to achieve a similar end through a cumulative effect, and they succeed for a short while in the middle of the film. Collaging brief moments of tenderness with others of extreme cruelty, and big life decisions with touching, ordinary details, they aim for poignancy at every turn, and the film often feels like little more than a series of attempted shortcuts to emotion. But when all four storylines simultaneously reach their dramatic climax, “The Young Mothers’ Home” momentarily takes off: rather than a social-realist collection of documentary-like short stories, it becomes an angry and moving film about the plight of kids forced to make momentous decisions about the shape of lives they’ve barely begun to live.
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This does not, however, eclipse the issue of uneven performances, though it feels hardly fair to bring this up when the actors are given so little to work with. Other Dardennes films centered on solo protagonists — not least among them the Palme d’Or winner “Rosetta,” whose star Émilie Dequenne tragically died earlier this year at just 43 years old — gave newcomers with a lot to prove an opportunity to breathe life into thinly sketched out parts. The constant switch from one story to another in “The Young Mothers’ Home” makes that virtually impossible. It also brings attention to plot mechanics, which, though not subtle, might have formed a solid basis for a more patient film, more alive to atmosphere and personality.
When one such quieter scene finally does come to conclude the film, it does not feel earned: the move to a more observational mode is jarring, and what emotion the sequence elicits essentially revolves around the presence of a cute baby. Rather than individuals facing all-too-common yet rarely portrayed challenges, the characters here seem little more than pawns in a predictable game, whose conclusion is never in doubt. In a Competition that featured more than one intricately plotted rug-pull of a film, and in a dual career full of magisterial storytelling, “The Young Mothers’ Home” feels like an odd choice for a Best Screenplay win. [C]
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