“Broken mothers give birth to shattered daughters, if no one interrupts the transmission.”
— Nayyirah Waheed
In Young Mothers, the Dardenne brothers abandon individual monologues to build a collective organism that breathes with difficulty, in a confined space where motherhood is not a choice but a shock, a reaction, a defensive gesture, and sometimes an escape. The characters exist in an unstable balance, crushed between containment institutions and unresolved affections. There is no redemption, only approximations to a minimal threshold of shared existence.
Perla, with her son Noé, clings to a vague idea of stability, based on the need for the other, Robin, to stay after being released from prison. She is building their couple’s life, but Robin, as much a child as she is, is unprepared and brutally disinterested. The prayer becomes superstition: please don’t leave me too. When Perla asks if he would stay if she gave Noé up for foster care, his answer is a retreat. She looks for him, but the scene has already passed. The desire to hold on to someone dissolves the moment it is expressed.
In a narrated fragment of childhood, a canary is drowned in the toilet: a marginal yet irrevocable act, the mute gesture of a mother unable to recognize the living as something to preserve.
Julie tries to survive through the trade she learned—cutting hair—but a panic attack, a chance encounter with a drug dealer, and she forgets Mia, her daughter. Julie’s body already gives in, overcome by an overdose that is the exact form of helplessness. Dylan stays, cries, resists with her. The promise of their first home together arrives.
Jessica seeks her mother Morgane to tell her about her motherhood, but rejection repeats endlessly. She continues to follow the event of a meeting that never happened, tails her to find out where she works, to communicate a biological fact—“I gave birth”—as if mere information could restore a bond, an embrace. No response. No question, except the one left suspended: why did you leave me, did you feel anything when you held me in your arms…
Ariane, barely fifteen, and Lili embody the film’s central paradox: motherhood as imposition, as a conditioned reflex, as a side effect of another’s desire. The daughter who was not wanted but whom the mother Nathalie demanded, the violence of the partner, the squalor, the hypocrisy of institutions. The attempt to place the baby elsewhere as the only form of lucidity.
Dylan’s minimum wage from a baker’s apprenticeship, social assistance, the group home, social workers—all administrative appendages of structural marginality. There is no escape from the perimeter. They merely float.
The questions that permeate the film find no narrative resolution: becoming a mother to no longer be a daughter, becoming a mother to hold on to love, to escape dependency, by imitation, out of duty, or by mistake. Early motherhood as a reflexive act, an extreme attempt to build a form, a structure, an identity starting from a void. But it doesn’t hold.
Apollinaire leaves farewell words of a teacher from whom recognition and comfort were sought while music accompanies a welcoming finale.
The letter to Lili, dated 19/7/2042, for the daughter given up for foster care, tries to fix something in time: an explanation, a reason, perhaps a delayed caress. But it remains written. Unspoken.
The narrative moves on a plane of constant brutality: Julie, the girl abused by her stepfather and beaten until she had to deny it, the daughter absorbing the mother’s cracks without ever truly naming them. Love neither redeems nor saves. One desires a different life—not out of shame but instinct. Shame is irrelevant. What remains is necessity.
In this film, the mother is no longer a symbolic figure or refuge. She is an absent presence, a traumatic agent, a repeated mistake. To be a mother here is an empty task, a gesture without guarantees, a relational form devoid of stable foundation: being the result of a missed, suffered, pursued, erased, violated love cannot generate love except in existential, social, economic, real conflict.
None of the young women truly succeeds, perhaps they somehow do. None can fully. And the film does nothing to mask this.
The Dardennes thus construct a narrative machine that records, documents, without providing footholds. Existence is shown in its contained collapse. Without rhetoric. Without light.
There are silences between mother and daughter that make more noise than a whole life.”
— Elena Ferrante
