Young Mothers Delivers Europe’s Future

It is implicit in the semi-doc perspective that Belgium’s Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne bring to contemporary social problems that they are also looking at Europe’s future. In Young Mothers (Jeunes mères) they observe four teenagers living at a shelter for unwed girls where they are given support, are taught household skills and infant care, and receive parental or adoption counseling.

This is not the sappiness heard in Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All.” In that tune, in her least convincing performance, Houston bleated, “I believe the children are our future.” She bypassed the selflessness of motherhood to shamelessly market pop narcissism, turning what was originally a ludicrous ’70s movie theme that extolled what Tom Wolfe called the “Me” generation” into the quintessential ’80s anthem: “Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.” Rather than cheer on Zoomer vapidity, the Dardennes hold to account the millennium’s failure to nurture its youth.

It is proof of the Dardennes’ generally perceptive filmmaking that the complications of Young Mothers also reveal how this generation’s irresponsible naïveté besets society — deranging their lives, neglecting their own heritage and potential. The film is Belgium’s submission for Best International Film at this year’s Academy Awards.

The opening shot is a close-up of 15-year-old Jessica (Babette Verbeek) anxiously looking for a stranger who might be her mother, the woman who birthed her but gave her up. Broad-faced blonde Jesssica is at a bus station where a group of black immigrant men fill the background space behind her, establishing situations of individual and group displacement — in essence, a snapshot of contemporary Europe’s stagnation.

The Dardennes have become spokesmen of liberal European social consciousness. Dreadful as that sounds, most of their films are fine examples of humanist identification without verging into that mawkish self-righteousness that now goes by the term “empathy.” (Only their Young Ahmed and Tori and Lokita sank into excessive pity and unacceptable liberal guilt — although neither did so fully.) Perhaps the Dardennes’ documentary background provides the professionalism that maintains their tactful distance.

Young Mothers never succumbs to mawkish sentimentality, but its mixed-tape vision of several girls’ stories varies the experiences so that none of them are viewed as stereotypes. They’re on the same page only when they follow the shelter’s rules of cooperation, sympathetic when another is unable to comply.

Each girl’s tale features a distinct circumstance: Jessica is just about to deliver; Perla (Lucie Laruelle), who has ventured outside her African immigrant tribe, tries holding on to Robin (Günter Duret), the white babydaddy she loves. The new parenthood of Julie (Elsa Houben) with Dylan (Jef Jacobs) is complicated by their shared drug addiction. Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan ) fears motherhood in response to her own neglectful mother (Christelle Cornil), whom Ariane distrusts, despite the slattern’s desperate efforts to make amends as a grandmother.

This panoply is credible without button-pushing “diversity.” The actresses are each believably youthful, sensitive, and yearning yet skeptical. Pick a favorite, then be swayed by another’s urgency. The story of Ariane and her hard-luck mother feels worthy of François Ozon expansion. Cultural differences between Perla and Robin might deserve feature-length study on the level of Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’s 1985 classic American documentary, Seventeen. Jessica stalking her birth mom and realizing the cycle of pubescent error recalls the Dardennes’ poignant The Son.

The Dardennes demonstrate their finest sociological instincts when Julie and Dylan recover their social roots and connect with their histories. They take their infant Mia to visit the matriarchal schoolteacher who witnessed their marriage; she had introduced Julie to Apollinaire’s poem “The Farewell” (a poem about resilience, recalling the La Fontaine fable in André Téchiné’s Wild Reeds). She treats the young family to a piano performance that always accompanied her lecture, playing a lively version of Mozart’s “Rondo à la Turc.”

During this get-together, the generalized social problems portrayed in Young Mothers find momentary resolve through the continuation of cultural heritage. The Dardennes’ sense of purpose contrasts with the blatant disservice of MTV’s Teen Moms series, which commodified the crisis of teenage pregnancy, with MTV treating the kids’ errors and society’s failings as the same. The Dardennes know enough to see what Apollinaire and Mozart still offer to progressive liberal culture. They find a young mother’s future in her heritage.