Young Mothers

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

YOUNG MOTHERS   **1/2

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

2025

IDEA:  A handful of young women living in a group home navigate their responsibilities as new mothers.

BLURB:  The typical Dardennes movie clings unwaveringly to the perspective of one or two characters, the narrative and visual focus so tight you feel by the end that you’ve become conjoined with them. Perhaps one of the problems with Young Mothers is that it lacks this sustained closeness, spread as it is among four protagonists who must share screen time without, strangely, spending very much of that time together. The Dardennes instead rotate between them, and as capable as all the young actresses are, they tend to blur together in their similar backgrounds and present situations. All are anxiously figuring out how, or if, to raise their babies as they variously wrestle with absent boyfriends, overbearing or absent parents, and legacies of abuse, poverty, and abandonment within their families. The cast is uniformly affecting, and there are individual scenes — a tussle with a selfish mom over her granddaughter, a boyfriend’s hospital visit to his drug-relapsed partner — that have the matter-of-fact immediacy and naked, disarming emotional force that are Dardennes hallmarks. In too many other instances, urgency and engagement are hampered by a script that is at once diffuse and obvious (“I don’t want to be like you,” explicates daughter to mom) and by images that don’t carry much visual interest. There will always be great use for media that empathically spotlights the oft-belittled experiences of young, vulnerable mothers, but it’s disappointing that Young Mothers doesn’t offer much beyond the commonplace.