{"id":236186,"date":"2026-01-09T14:38:07","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T14:38:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/236186\/"},"modified":"2026-01-09T14:38:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T14:38:07","slug":"dardenne-brothers-in-fine-fraught-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/236186\/","title":{"rendered":"Dardenne brothers in fine, fraught form"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since their venture into narrative film in the late 1980s, Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne<\/a> have been carving out a distinctly humanist niche. Between Two Days, One Night<\/a>, The Son<\/a>, and La Promesse, their cinematic style is rooted in their documentarian past, following their characters with a wandering camera that moves in tandem with the actor, the direction only ever serving the fraught story. With their newest offering, Young Mothers, the Dardennes turn their lens on a group of women, all at different stages of motherhood and living together in a purpose-built center. The result is a cacophony of painful stories, each observing the multi-faceted phenomenon of unconditional love between mother and child: What people expect it to be, what it really is, and how it takes on new, strange shapes in the shifting light.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Dardennes split the plot of Young Mothers across four main characters: Ariane (Jana\u00cfna Halloy Fokan) is weighing whether to give her daughter up for adoption; Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is two weeks away from giving birth and desperately trying to reconnect with her own estranged birth mother; Julie (Elsa Houben) is a recovering addict, determined to put a deposit on a house; and Perla (Lucie Laruelle) desperately clings to her distant boyfriend for fear of one day being a single mother.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Together these stories provide yet another showcase for the Dardennes\u2019 skill with simple, effective characters who have recognizable impulses and fears. One of the ways they achieve this is by centering each woman in the shot, resigning their boyfriends and families to the edges of the frame. When Perla\u2019s boyfriend stubbornly stomps away from her, the camera holds not on his anger or momentum but on Perla\u2019s crestfallen expression. Men float in and out of the story, but women are the ones tending care. The home\u2019s attendants and the protagonists\u2019 fellow mothers overlap in sweet ways, pockets of soft gentleness against the unrelenting concrete grey of their city.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a revealing sequence, Jessica is struck by the distance she feels from her newborn baby. She stares longingly at her daughter\u2019s reflection in the bathroom mirror, admitting that \u201cI was so excited to hold you against me. I feel nothing.\u201d The camera then follows her across a silent scene of putting her baby to bed and collapsing in tears. Jessica\u2019s head is buried in her bedsheets, her frame shaking with sobs. The camera holds as Ariane approaches, discernible only from the back of her head. She offers a despondent Jessica words of reassurance, covering her torso, leaning towards her head. Both characters are faceless, distinguishable only by how their bodies tangle together.<\/p>\n

Young Mothers is filled with several visual moments like this, that speak to a kind of casual interconnectedness\u2014a running theme in the brothers\u2019 work. A disarming empathy governs all of the Dardennes\u2019 projects, and it\u2019s that sensitivity that carries into the conclusion of Young Mothers, which sees the core characters through foster care, marriage, and relapse.<\/p>\n

While Young Mothers deploys the filmmakers\u2019 disarming brand<\/a> of compassion, the decision to split the runtime across a quartet of main characters does mean that each woman feels more like a conduit for different forms of motherhood than a fully-fledged person in their own right. But despite this leading to the film\u2019s place as a slighter project in the directors\u2019 oeuvre, there is still something profoundly enriching about their pared-down approach. Even in the more shallow form of Young Mothers, the Dardennes\u2019 work emphasizes that there is little that\u2019s more cinematic than complicated people surviving difficult circumstances.<\/p>\n

Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Writer: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Starring: Jana\u00cfna Halloy Fokan, Babette Verbeek, Elsa Houben, Lucie Laruelle
Release Date: January 9, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since their venture into narrative film in the late 1980s, Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":236187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":{"0":"post-236186","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}