Cinema releases. "Young Mothers": the matrix film by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne

It all begins there. Frail beings who know nothing of the world, but already carry both its violence and tenderness, all its invisible burden. They are babies, yes. But perhaps—and this is the film's moving insight—they are already those little characters seen in the Dardenne brothers' other films. Already Igor, already Rosetta, already Lorna or Cyril. Before abandonment. Before flight. Before exile. Before collapse.

Young Mothers is like a genesis. We suddenly understand, with a strange shudder, that these infants are perhaps the same ones we have known until now in their films, wandering through the wastelands of Seraing, running between social ruins, fists clenched and hearts in disarray. For all the Dardennes' characters seem to come from there: from a hesitant love, a fragile gesture, a wounded but alive origin. From a precarious motherhood.

This film would be a bit like returning to the starting point of the stories they have filmed so far. The opening song of their entire work. We will no longer look at Rosett , who had revealed Émilie Dequenne, in the same way after seeing Jeunes Mères . We imagine the baby she was, her body that we were learning to hold, her head that we had to support, the arms that one day rocked her... or not.

It's as if the Dardenne brothers were inviting us to look here at what came before, in a film that is the matrix of their cinema, which has always recounted fragile, wounded childhood and adolescence, and the social determinism that goes with it. The predisposition to the first cry of life. And this before has the sleepy face of an infant nestled against a young mother still unsure of herself. There are five of them in their film, teenagers or young girls who have become mothers without being quite ready, and whom we see learning not to play motherhood, but to tame it and live it. Becoming a mother.

The staging embraces their clumsiness like grace. Nothing is fixed, everything is in flux. Each scene seems like a miracle snatched from the unexpected. For here, reality is a demanding partner of cinema: a baby cries, and the story falters. We must wait. Adapt. Be reborn with it. Young Mothers films life, not as a straight line, but as a ragged breath. A hiccup of emotion.

The babies, filmed without artifice, become the masters of the narrative. Through their gestures unscripted by the script, their impromptu tears, their sketched smiles. Each scene, each shot seems suspended in their natural uncertainty. And in this instability—in this organic truth—the Dardennes find the exact pulse of what it means to become a mother: an incessant worry, an awkward love, an instinct that emerges without instructions.

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne abandon their legendary, precise control in favor of letting go. Fewer holds, more waiting. Less mastery, more acceptance. The chaos of birth is embraced with gentleness, fiction becomes permeable to the living. Cinema, finally, gives way to life.

And perhaps this is the miracle of Young Mothers : making the toddler not a filmed subject, but an actor in the world. A cinematic being and the beginnings of humanity. Each cry becomes a response. Each look, a revelation. And each silence, a manifesto. The Dardennes dared to go back to the beginning. And in this origin, there is the warm skin of a baby. There is the restlessness of a young arm. There is the dizzying idea that perhaps, everything we become, we have been from the very first seconds. Our destiny.

Young Mothers by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, in theaters this Friday, May 23. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.