The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, have long functioned as a Belgian answer to Ken Loach, pitching their film-making camp among the most marginalised and forgotten. Normally this means clear-eyed fables of teenagers and twentysomethings living in difficult circumstances: nightmare parents, petty crime, drugs and jail. In a series of films between the mid-90s and early-10s, they twice won the Palme d’Or, plus the best screenplay and the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival for their distinctive brand of naturalist storytelling, employing a light-on-its-feet handheld travelling-camera style to deal with some seriously dark material. Then came bit of a wobble; perhaps their success opened up opportunities they couldn’t turn down. They found themselves working with an actual film star (Marion Cotillard) and then turned to hot-button issues – radical Islamism in Young Ahmed, illegal immigration in Tori and Lokita – which perhaps didn’t bring the best out of them.
Well, all this is a preamble to saying that Young Mothers sees the Dardennes fully back in their comfort zone, with material and actors they know how to deal with. The subject, as the title suggests, is the young women who find themselves pregnant, or with very young children, and who are heartbreakingly ill-equipped to deal with the situation. Challenges range from basic techniques of baby care – one, for example, has to be reminded to take her phone off the baby changing mat – to the emotional storms of recalcitrant boyfriends, drug dependency and narcissistic and uninterested parents of their own.
