No process tests the soul like motherhood. For a human being, a body is in constant transition for nine months. Even non-mothers know that pregnancy affects a fetus’s development in the womb and can even permanently change the body’s anatomy. Add to this the cocktail of adolescence and you have an imminent train wreck.
In Young Mothers, a French feature directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne – better known as the Dardenne Brothers – and screening at the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF) 2025, we have four teens navigating their motherhood journeys while dealing with addiction, love, unstable parents, and absent partners.
The girls – Jessica, Perla, Julie and Arane, played by Babette Verbeek, Lucie Laruelle, Elsa Houben and Janina Hellowe Fokken, respectively – live in their parents’ home in Liège, Belgium, and are at the crossroads of adulthood. There’s no pregnancy glow, no time for longing, no partner to hold the baby. Just a few good women, symbolizing their absent mothers, in a shelter, who help them avoid falling into an emotional quagmire. Jessica may soon be born, as she yearns for her mother who abandoned her in infancy.
Perla, Julie and Eren are new mothers, their babies only a few weeks old. Perla encouraged the child’s father, himself a teenager, to move in with her. He is rejecting her. The struggle for Julie is her own addiction. She doesn’t trust herself to take on responsibilities. Meanwhile, Arine understands the uncertainty of the life ahead. Growing up with an abusive parent, she knows the consequences it can have on her own child and wants to overcome it.
Girls want to assert themselves because they have just gone through a very adulting process. However, they fear the consequences of their claims which confuse them further. Girls see their relationships with their children as an extension of their longings in life, with guilt and fear of abandonment creeping in from time to time.
What’s phenomenal about Young Mothers is that the Dardenne brothers don’t go into a solo state of existence. They use the complexities of the teen mom community to move the plot forward. The directors are aware of the impossibility of describing the process of giving birth to a child, so they stick to teenage impulses and the actors deliver exceptional performances. The scenes, shot with handheld cameras, are intimate and often anxiety-provoking, especially because they involve babies as young as a few weeks old in the arms of their “child mothers”.
The Dardenne brothers trust their audience with the intelligence of the interpretations, which was evident from the ample conversation after the screening: Was the film about the universal question of motherhood? Was it particularly intense because of the lack of detection after delivery? Was it about the assertion of identity, which destroys the image of the sacrificial mother?
It is difficult to reach any conclusion after watching Young Mothers but the desire for closure is closure in itself.