by Hudson Moura
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s The Young Mothers’ Home (Jeune Mères) returns to the filmmakers’ ethical realist terrain with an ensemble portrait set in a Maison Maternelle, where pregnant adolescents and very young mothers navigate the volatile border between childhood and parenthood. Rather than building toward a single catharsis, the film gathers force through four interwoven, fragile narratives.
Vanessa—pregnant and searching for the mother who once placed her in the system (an act she experiences as abandonment)—pursues an apartment as a form of anchorage, even as she wonders whether repeating that earlier decision might, paradoxically, be the least harmful choice. Perla, caring for her infant Noé, seeks out Robin, the baby’s father, newly released and unwilling to cohabit or accept responsibility. Ariane manages supervised visits between her daughter Lili and the girl’s grandmother, all the while anxious about the man now residing in her mother’s flat. And Julie and Dylan—adolescent parents to Mia—contend with the gravitational pull of Julie’s former dealers; when she falters, Dylan’s support is tested, registering less as a cure-all than as the tenuous resolve of youth under pressure.
True to the Dardennes’ method, the camera observes at human height and breathing distance, refusing melodramatic punctuation. The mise-en-scène—corridors, common rooms, cramped bedrooms, municipal offices—renders the institution not as faceless bureaucracy but as a lived architecture of care, strain, and contingency. Within this frame, performances are unadorned and tensile; the young women carry tenderness and volatility in the same gesture, their affect ricocheting from devotion to exhaustion, from protectiveness to flight. Crucially, the film allows their bonds to register without sentimentality. The house becomes a commons where complicity and mutual aid emerge from shared precarity: mothers rocking each other’s babies, swapping advice, absorbing small breakdowns without judgment. These micro-acts of solidarity do not dissolve structural pressures—absent fathers, addiction, poverty, the state’s uneven safety net—but they complicate any easy moral arithmetic of “good” and “bad” mothers.
The film is at its most incisive when it lingers on the ambiguity of responsibility. These adolescents are, as the work gently insists, still children learning to raise other children. Love is palpable, but so is the residue of earlier wounds—abandonment, intimidation, the ambient threat of male authority that arrives either as control or as disappearance. The relationships with their babies are consequently double-exposed: genuine attachment coexists with fear, resentment, and the temptation to retreat. Rather than pathologize this ambivalence, the Dardennes treat it as a realistic grammar of early motherhood under constraint.
If the narrative occasionally brushes past familiar notes—the unreliable young father, the stern senior official bristling at frontline workers—the film’s rigor of observation keeps it from cliché. The final effect is not one of uplift or despair but of moral attention: a sustained look at lives in which every choice is expensive and every ordinary task (finding a flat, attending a visit, staying clean, staying) is a minor act of defiance. Jeunes Mères does not ask us to “solve” its protagonists; it asks us to witness their labor—of care, of endurance, of self-making—without stripping away the contradictions that make that labor real.
Rating: 3.5/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 