THE STORY – Five young mothers living in a shelter strive for a better future for themselves and their kids amidst challenging upbringings.
THE CAST – Lucie Laruelle, Babette Verbeek, Elsa Houben, Janaïna Halloy, Samia Hilmi, Jef Jacobs, Günter Duret, Christelle Cornil, India Hair & Joely Mbundu
THE TEAM – Luc Dardenne & Jean-Pierre Dardenne (Directors/Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 minutes
Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been creating gently tear-jerking social realist dramas for decades now. Their style hasn’t changed much over the years, except for the occasional dalliance with professional actors (“Two Days, One Night,” “The Kid With A Bike”) in addition to their preferred non-professionals. “The Young Mother’s Home,” their latest, finds the brothers setting their sights on a group of teenage girls living in a shelter for young mothers. The shelter’s social workers help them with taking care of their children and each other, creating a supportive community. Outside the shelter, though, the world is not as supportive, as boyfriends, family members, and others continually let them down.
Jessica (Babette Verbeek), the newest shelter resident, is searching for her birth mother, needing to know why she gave her up before she decides what to do with her own baby, while Ariane (Janaina Halloy) is trying to avoid her own birth mother (Christelle Cornil), who raised her in an abusive household, and is considering giving her baby to a foster family who can give them a better life. Perla (Lucie Laurelle) is ready to settle down with her boyfriend in an apartment the shelter will rent to her for cheap, but he seems less sure of that plan. Julie (Elsa Houben), meanwhile, has a devoted boyfriend who is ready to settle down, but she’s still suffering from debilitating anxiety attacks over potentially backtracking her sobriety.
As we follow each of these girls, the Dardennes show how the social safety net helps and fails them in different ways. Some of them, like Jessica, have no one to help them, having been in the foster system for years themselves. Others, like Perla, have families that may be reaching the end of their rope in terms of how much support they can provide. Even the girls who seem to have everything together have difficulties – Ariane’s mother genuinely wants to be there for her daughter and granddaughter, but their shared history and her continual slip-ups make it difficult for Ariane to trust her.
Trust is the most important currency the girls have, and the film highlights just how difficult it is to receive and maintain it. At the end of the day, all they have is each other, because their shared experiences make each other their best support system. The moments of tenderness between the girls make it easier to root for them to rise above, because we see how good things could be for them. Given the girls’ often striking maturity, it’s easy to forget how young they are, but the gravity of their situation puts their youth in sharp relief, as when Perla shuts down after a day of worse and worse news and considers abandoning her baby altogether, or when Julie forgets to pick her baby up from daycare after a terrible anxiety attack. These all-too-human mistakes are fully understandable but could lead to devastating consequences for the girls, an unimaginable burden to place on ones so young.
The brilliance of the Dardennes’ scenario for the film is in how they immerse you in these girls’ lives, covering every conceivable angle and using each character as both reflection of and contrast to each other. Their parallel journeys highlight the ways in which their stories deviate from each other while emphasizing the ways in which they are all the same – namely in terms of how dependent they are on outside help, despite their resilience. None of these characters can do this on their own, and the film’s most emotionally resonant moments are when they either realize that they can’t no matter how hard they try or receive help from an unexpected source.
The film’s denouement offers a series of these moments, each more tear-inducing than the last thanks to the naturalistic performances of the main cast, a hallmark of the Dardennes’ films. The brothers may never be the most exciting directors – their well-trod vérité style has its limits – but they’re so good at what they do that that hardly matters. “The Young Mother’s Home” represents the Dardennes at their humanistic best.
