‘Newborns’: the Dardenne brothers explore teenage motherhood with their raw realism | Cinema: premieres and reviews

Three years ago, Pilar Palomero approached The Maternal to the complex reality of teenage pregnancies through a child who enters a shelter for underage mothers. That character, Carla, as well as the mirror of her own mother, allowed the Spanish director to explore a territory of fragile family structures in which girl mothers face the contradictions and fears of early motherhood.

newbornsthe last film by the Dardenne brothers, leading exponents of a European social cinema that they themselves rewrote at the end of the 20th century, addresses the same issue as The Maternal. But instead of focusing on a single teenager, it does so through five characters, focusing on the intersection of realities within a shelter for minor mothers in the Belgian town of Liege.

The pain of this very vulnerable group emerges in a film that shows many other disparate conflicts—violent homes, poverty, addictions…—, which, despite the underlying helplessness, avoids falling into cruelty or sordidity. Faced with that, and despite the very sad stories it tells, newborns gives off hope. The Dardennes are not interested in exploiting the morbidity of pain, but rather in exposing with their usual rigor why education or social work—both today threatened by those who believe neither in pedagogy nor in aid for the most disadvantaged—are useful for a lot.

The brothers build newborns around group dynamics in caring for babies and psychological care for adolescents who must demonstrate whether they are capable of looking after their children. Behind each character lies that insurmountable dilemma: it is not enough to love your child, you have to assume the responsibility of taking care of him.

Winner of the best screenplay award at the last Cannes, a festival that has been recognizing for years the cinema of a couple who has turned their commitment to reality into a banner, Newborns, chosen to represent Belgium at the next Oscars, does not reach the mastery of his previous film: the resounding and moving Torr it. But it does work as a panoramic view of a marginal social reality.

In Torr it The work of the debut actress Mbundu Joely stood out, who played the protagonist there, an undocumented teenager who found refuge in an African child like her while the mafias exploited them. There is no in newborns an equivalent to Joely, who has a supporting role in this drama about rejected sons and lost mothers. A presence as captivating as theirs is missing, but the puzzle of faces that the Dardennes propose ends up forming a chorus capable of giving intimacy and character to this new social denunciation. A film that demonstrates the validity of these two filmmakers’ way of understanding art as political combat.