YOUNG MOTHERS

Cannes darlings Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes (two-time Palme d’Or winners for Rosetta and L’Enfant) picked up more accolades this year with Young Mothers, winning Best Screenplay at the festival. Their latest deftly threads the needle between social realism and melodrama, weaving together the stories of five girls living temporarily in a shelter for young and expecting mothers in Liège, Belgium. At this refuge, they receive counseling, assistance with daily activities, and the skills to care for themselves and their infants independently from the patient women who staff the facility. From this center, their stories branch out, bringing in people and stories from their fragile support systems. All the young actors are astonishing, each authentic and devastating in their own way, radiating interior lives that are both overactive and undeveloped. With a light touch, the film draws out the ways in which their stories intersect, how the choices of their parents affected them, how the life-changing decisions they are making now might ripple into the next generation, and how disenfranchisement, addiction, abuse, and poverty tear at the social fabric. Young Mothers has a cumulative power that represents the Dardennes’ filmmaking at its clearest and most empathetic. ~OO