Latest news with #DardenneBrothers
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Cannes Gives Warm Welcome to Dardennes and ‘Young Mother's Home'
In what has become a familiar sight on the Croisette, Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne strolled up the red carpet to present their new film to a welcoming crowd. The Dardennes' latest, The Young Mother's Home premiered early Friday evening, marking the brothers' ninth entry in Cannes competition. The Dardennes almost never leave Cannes empty-handed. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Resurrection' Review: Director Bi Gan's Beguiling, Beautifully Realized Journey Through the Life, Death and Possible Rebirth of Cinema 'Woman and Child' Review: An Unwieldy Iranian Melodrama Sustained by Great Performances and a Gifted Young Director Cate Blanchett, Afghan, Syrian Creators on Fund for Displaced Directors Backing "Surprising Narratives" Casual with suits and no ties (the early afternoon screenings are not mandatory black-tie), the Dardennes strolled up to the premiere accompanied by their somewhat more excited (and better dressed) young stars: Lucie Laruelle, Babette Verbeek, Elsa Houben, Janaïna Halloy Fokan and Samia Hilmi. Warm, enthusiastic applause rolled over the auditorium in waves as the film credits rolled, and the Dardennes embraced their co-stars. The young actresses wiped away tears. Laruelle, who plays Perla in the film, was visibly shaking with emotion, before joining her co-stars in a group hug. The film, while containing all of the raw realism the Dardenne's are known for, is also uncharacteristically warm and optimistic, touches that left the Cannes audience smiling on their way to the exits. French director Luc Besson and Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont (Closer) were also at the premiere. Twice the Dardennes have gone home with the Palme d'Or — for Rosetta (1999) and L'Enfant (2005) — and their festival trophy case includes best director honors for Young Ahmed (2019), the Grand Jury Prize for The Kid With a Bike (2011), best screenplay for Lorna's Silence (2008), and, for Tori and Lokita in 2022, a special prize honoring Cannes' 75th anniversary. The Young Mother's Home is another slice of Belgian social realism from Dardennes. Set in a shelter for young mothers, the film follows five women — Jessica, Perla, Julie, Naïma, and Ariane — as they navigate the challenges of early motherhood while striving for a better future for themselves and their children. The cast features Lucie Laruelle, Babette Verbeek, Elsa Houben, Janaïna Halloy Fokan, and Samia Hilmi, with India Hair portraying a key supporting role. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Young Mothers' Review: The Dardenne Brothers Bring Clear-Sighted Observation and Empathy to a Tender Snapshot of Women at a Crossroads
The stripped-down aesthetic principles, compassionate humanism and naturalistic purity in the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne make their body of work uncommonly cohesive. It's easy to be glib about the influential Belgian brothers and say you know exactly what you're getting with a new Dardenne film — much like their social realist counterpart across the North Sea, Ken Loach, whose films they began helping to produce in 2009. But anticipating the form, the political leanings or broad thematic concerns of a movie is not the same as knowing in advance where it will take you, what kind of marginalized lives it will illuminate. Ever since their international breakthrough in the 1990s with La Promesse and Rosetta, there's always been the capacity to surprise in a Dardenne movie. Their latest, Young Mothers (Jeunes Mères), is the filmmakers' most surprising work in years. It provides unfiltered emotional access to the anxieties and hopes of five vulnerable working-class teenage women and the babies requiring their love and care, often when they can barely care for themselves. More from The Hollywood Reporter Cannes Power Outage Disrupts City, Festival Continues Inside IMG's Huge Sports Production Weekend: From English, U.S., Saudi Soccer to Basketball and F1 'Honey Don't!' Review: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans Get Stranded in Ethan Coen's Wayward Whodunit The project was hatched out of a visit by the Dardennes to a maternal support home near Liège, with the initial aim of developing a story about one young mother struggling to connect with her baby. But they were so struck by what they witnessed there — among the mothers as well as the nursing, counseling and administrative staff — that they expanded their plans to build a multicharacter ensemble piece. That alone marks a shift for the writer-directors, whose work tends predominantly to lock in on one or two main characters. It also allows them to draw even more than usual on their background in documentary. Young Mothers is closer to docu-fiction than any of their recent work. It follows the struggles of four women, three of them with newborns and one who's pregnant with a looming due date, plus a fifth whose stay at the shelter is nearing its end. Just two weeks away from giving birth, Jessica (Babette Verbeek) waits in an agitated state at a bus stop where she has organized to meet her biological mother Morgane (India Hair), who gave her up for adoption when she was younger than her daughter is now. Both before and after the arrival of her baby, Jessica longs to understand the reasoning behind her mother's decision, and to know if she ever felt remorse. Perla (Lucie Laruelle) has given birth to a son while the boy's father, Robin (Gunter Duret), was in juvenile detention. She brings him a spliff to celebrate his release, but Robin shows little affection for her and barely even looks at their child. While Perla has signed out of the shelter for several hours, expecting to spend the day with him, Robin can't get away fast enough. Perla faints when she gets back, and another young mother, Julie (Elsa Houben), massages her to knead the numbness out of her body. Fifteen-year-old Ariane (Janaina Halloy Fokan) wants to put her infant daughter in foster care and finish school. Her mother Nathalie (Christelle Cornil), who talked her out of having an abortion, is against that plan, insisting she can help raise the child. But Nathalie is a drunk who has been in an abusive relationship with a violent man. At first, she coaxes Ariane to visit by assuring her that she has quit drinking and dumped the guy, but there are signs that indicate otherwise. Growing impatient with her daughter's rebukes, Nathalie snaps, 'He hit me worse than he hit you.' Julie and her baby's sweet-natured father, Dylan (Jef Jacobs), are both recovering addicts. They leave their young daughter at a childcare facility while they go across town to see a subsidized apartment where they hope to live as a family. Dylan, a baker's apprentice, wants to marry her; their journey on his moped is one of the film's loveliest sequences, an image of freedom and happiness that suggests such a life might be within reach. But there are hiccups. Setbacks are as much a part of these women's realities as their tentative steps forward, yearning to carve out better lives for themselves and their children. One incentive to keep trying is the success of Naïma (Samia Hilmi), who is preparing to move with her child into their own flat and is on track to secure a job as a railway ticket inspector. Her sendoff from the shelter, with cake served outside in the garden, is one of many affecting displays of solidarity. Others have a bumpier path: Julie relapses into drug use and anxiety attacks; Perla refuses to read the obvious signs that Robin has no interest in settling down with her or becoming a hands-on father; Jessica keeps hitting a wall with her mother and has a hostile encounter with the unsympathetic parents of her baby's father, who run what appears to be a successful gym. They demand to know what she wants from their son, insisting that she's to blame for her situation since she declined to have the abortion they offered to pay for. The filmmakers thread these stories seamlessly into a larger picture that balances despair with moments that point cautiously toward a more stable future. There's never a false note from the young actors, all of whom have deeply moving scenes. But Young Mothers is also captivating when it's simply taking in the quotidian responsibilities of new parenthood — feeding, diaper changing, bathtime — or when it catches an expression of wonder or joy as a mother gazes into the tiny face of the child she has created. DP Benoît Dervaux's camera is always attentive, never intrusive or fussy, and the use of only available light adds to the documentary-like authenticity of the stories. Possibly the single most gorgeous moment in the movie happens when one of the mothers, bracing for the wrenching separation of putting her baby into foster care, straps the infant into a car seat. If you don't melt when you see the blissful smile that spreads across the baby's adorable face and lights up her eyes, I suspect you're a terrible person. As attuned as they are to the harsh experiences of characters living bare-bones existences on the fringes of society, the Dardennes have never been doom-peddling fatalists. That aspect is clear in a number of beautiful forward-facing scenes — Ariane writing a letter for her daughter to read when she turns 18; Jessica breaking through and being able to communicate with Morgane when her dogged determination pays off; Perla having a blowup fight with her older half-sister, Angèle (Joely Mbundu), but then reconciling with genuine warmth and an offer of support; and especially, Julie and Dylan taking their baby to visit a former music teacher who helped them both. The Dardennes are not in the business of offering easy fixes for their characters' difficulties. But when the teacher sits at the piano to begin the child's introduction to music, Mozart's 'Rondo a la Turca' sounds like a hymn of triumphant resilience and elation. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Hollywood Stars Who Are One Award Away From an EGOT 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Yes' Review: Nadav Lapid's Blistering Attack on Israeli Nationalism is an Effectively Blunt Instrument
No one was expecting Nadav Lapid to hold back in his first feature since the events of October 7, 2023: The Israeli filmmaker has long been cinema's most vigorously expressive and outspoken critic of government policy in his birth country, with films like 2019's 'Synonyms' and 2021's 'Ahed's Knee' bristling with fury and shame over Israel's national military culture and artistic censorship. Even with those expectations firmly in place, however, Lapid's new film 'Yes' startles with the sheer, spitting intensity of its rage against the state, projected onto its amoral blank-slate protagonist: a self-abasing musician commissioned to compose a rousing new national anthem, explicitly celebrating the demolition of Palestine. A whirling, maximalist satire at once despairing and exuberant, subtle as a cannonball in its evisceration of the ruling classes and those who obey them, it's both absurdist comedy and serious-as-cancer polemic: as grave as any film with an extended dance break to 2000s novelty hit 'The Ketchup Song' can possibly be. Following 'Ahed's Knee,' which played in competition at Cannes and won the jury prize, the placement of this huge, heaving work outside the festival's official selection — it premiered instead at the tail-end of the Directors' Fortnight sidebar — has raised eyebrows. It's hard not to suspect some level of programming timidity around a film this fragrantly provocative and topically hot, which will likely continue outside the festival sphere. Many arthouse distributors will say no to 'Yes,' a film sure to remain divisive even among audiences who share its politics, given its brash, antic eccentricity of tone and style. But this is not cinema made with the intent of being embraced or awarded by any faction: It's exhilaratingly of the moment and in the moment, a filmmaker's immediate, unfiltered response to atrocities too urgent to be addressed with tact or good taste. More from Variety Chilean AIDS Drama 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' Wins Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes Josh O'Connor Art Heist Film 'The Mastermind' Steals 5.5-Minute Cannes Ovation as Director Kelly Reichardt Says 'America Is in a Ditch Right Now' 'Young Mothers' Review: Belgium's Dardenne Brothers Adopt a Wider Focus for Their Most Humane Drama in More Than a Decade Played in ping-ponging modes of morose containment and deranged vitality by a superb Ariel Bronz, our hardly-hero is Y (the same cryptic name, though not the same character, as the protagonist in 'Ahed's Knee'), a pianist and performer introduced in the middle of a frantically choreographed Eurodance production number that sees him variously fellating a baguette, dunking his head into a punch bowl, bobbing for cherry tomatoes in a swimming pool, and extravagantly making out with dance partner Yasmine (Efrat Dor). Turns out she's also his wife, and together they make a living performing this kind of unhinged floor show at private parties for baying Tel Aviv elites. Whether an ensuing dance battle with a horde of Israeli military leaders is officially part of the routine or not, it seems to regularly happen anyway, with Yasmine quietly begging her husband to let them win — before they supplement the night's earnings with some three-way sex work for a frisky elderly client in a cavernous mansion with the taxidermied heads of her relatives mounted on the walls. Welcome to 'The Good Life,' as the film's first chapter is ruefully titled — good for whom, you might ask, though you hardly need to. By day, Y and Yasmine live in a modest city apartment with their baby son, further working as a musician and hip-hop dance instructor respectively. These are hard times for artists, and you take what gigs you can to get by: The title 'Yes' is seemingly a reference to the word that Y, in particular, simply cannot not say, at whatever cost to his integrity and sanity. A particularly hefty offer that he can't — but really, really should — refuse rolls in from a Russian oligarch (Aleksei Serebryakov, most recently seen to similarly shuddery effect in 'Anora') in bed with the Israeli authorities, who commissions Y to compose the music to a sort of hymn to the post-October 7 era. No standard compilation of patriotic platitudes, the lyrics Y is given to work with amount to barbaric bragging over the sheer scale of carnage the Israeli army has wrought on Gaza in the last 18 months: 'In one year there will be nothing left living there/And we'll return safely to our homes/We'll annihilate them all/And return to plow our fields.' Lapid trades in indelicate satire for indelicate times — Y at one point literally and lavishly licks his wealthy benefactor's gleaming knee-high boots — so these grisly verses at first seem a typically blunt caricature of Israeli nationalism at its most ruthless. But the great, gasp-inducing twist is that these lyrics are not a product of the director's imagination, but taken from a real-world composition by the anti-Palestinian activist group Civic Front. Also real is a climactic music video in which the song is trilled by a choir of cherubic, white-robed children, their faces altered by AI — it might not be state-produced propaganda, but it is indicative of a vicious political climate hard to parody in its excess and extremity. After the drunken, dizzying madness of the first act, the second — titled 'The Path' — arrives as a harsher hangover, as Y, after bleaching his hair and donning unseasonal velvet and snakeskin boots, takes a solo trek into the desert to work on the song. For morbid inspiration, he approaches the Palestinian border, signaled by a grimly hovering duvet of black smoke, and is joined by ex-girlfriend Lea (Naama Preis), an IDF employee who regales him with an exhaustive, vituperative litany of Hamas' crimes against Israel — her own way of rationalizing the panorama of destruction laid out before them. Y, doing his best to maintain apolitical blinkers on both sides, isn't convinced; meanwhile, he has the increasingly repulsed Yasmine and the chiding anti-Zionist voice of his late mother prompting him to wonder if he's said one yes too many. A third act, 'The Night,' sees these conflicting impulses and responsibilities finally come to a head: Y himself may not decide on a clear course of action, but 'Yes' makes brazenly clear its own conviction that silent neutrality is not conscionable or sustainable while the last of Gaza burns. Some may find Lapid's film a hectoring and repetitive statement, but it sets out to be one: Constructed with typical dynamism from the director but hardly as lyrical as 'Synonyms' or as intellectually knotty as 'Ahed's Knee,' this is rhetorical cinema that brooks no possibility of being misheard or misinterpreted. Rather, Lapid encourages all on his side to be at least as loud and strident in protest, to have any chance of being heard over the ongoing din of war. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Chilean AIDS Drama ‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo' Wins Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes
The Cannes Film Festival's second-most prestigious competition, Un Certain Regard, is typically dominated by newer, less heralded names in world cinema. But there was more star power than usual at stake in this year's awards ceremony, as pundits wondered whether one of the three debut features by prominent actors-turned-directors in this year's lineup — Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson — could land a prize. As it turned out, people needn't have worried about a Hollywood takeover. Stewart's 'The Chronology of Water' and Johansson's 'Eleanor the Great' both went unawarded, as the jury threw a relative curveball in handing the Prix Un Certain Regard to Chilean director Diego Céspedes for his alluringly titled first feature 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,' an offbeat study of a transgender commune living in the Chilean desert around the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. More from Variety Josh O'Connor Art Heist Film 'The Mastermind' Steals 5.5-Minute Cannes Ovation as Director Kelly Reichardt Says 'America Is in a Ditch Right Now' 'Young Mothers' Review: Belgium's Dardenne Brothers Adopt a Wider Focus for Their Most Humane Drama in More Than a Decade Rai Cinema Celebrates 'Heads or Tails?' at Cannes and Readies for More Hits: 'Cinema Without Audience Doesn't Exist' The film received mixed reviews when it premiered near the beginning of the festival: Variety critic Siddhant Adlakha wrote that it 'meanders on occasion, and never quite finds the right rhythm for its more traditional dialogue coverage,' but praised it for 'tremendously moving moments that stir the soul by scrutinizing the dueling cruelty and tenderness found within its characters.' The jury, meanwhile, praised it as 'raw and powerful and yet funny and wild,' before handing the prize to an astonished Céspedes, who stated tearily that his film 'began with all the angry lovers to just wanted to love like everybody else.' The decision rested with a jury headed by a relative newcomer herself: 31-year-old British writer-director Molly Manning Walker won the top prize in Un Certain Regard two years ago for her vivid debut 'How to Have Sex,' and was joined on the panel by filmmakers Louise Courvoisier and Roberto Minervini, actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart and Rotterdam fest director Vanja Kaluđerčić. Full list of winners: Prix Un Certain Regard: 'The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo,' Diego Céspedes Jury Prize: 'A Poet,' Simón Mesa Soto Best Screenplay: Harry Lighton, 'Pillion' Best Performance: Cléo Diara, 'I Only Rest in the Storm' and Frank Dillane, 'Urchin' Best Director: Tarzan and Arab Nasser, 'Once Upon a Time in Gaza' Best of Variety Emmy Predictions: Writing - 'The Studio' Submits One Episode Only, While 'Severance' and 'The Penguin' Go With Their Finales Emmy Predictions: The Art of the Submission Creates New and Viable Contenders Emmy Predictions: Directing (Drama, Comedy, Limited) - Will Ben Stiller, Philip Barantini and Seth Rogen All Become Award-Winning Auteurs?
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Young Mother's Home review – outstanding return to form for the Dardenne brothers
Gentleness, compassion and love are the keynotes of this quietly outstanding new movie from the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, for whom I think it is a return to form after some strained melodrama in their recent work. There is such simplicity and clarity here, an honest apportioning of dignity and intelligence to everyone on screen: every scene and every character portrait is unforced and unembellished. The straightforward assertion of hope through giving help and asking for help is very powerful. The Dardennes have again established their gold standard for social realist cinema at Cannes, and for regular attenders there is another poignant dimension – the memory of their Palme-winning film Rosetta presented at Cannes a quarter of a century ago, starring the then 17-year-old Émilie Dequenne in a very similar role to the characters here; her recent death from cancer was a great sadness. The location here is Liège in Belgium, at a state home for teen mothers or mothers-to-be, who are being helped and counselled in how to have their babies, how to bathe and feed them, how to make contact with prospective adoptive parents (if that is what they want), how to deal with existing issues of addiction and depression and how to find housing. The young mothers live together as a community, with a cooking rota. Perla (Lucie Laruelle) is a young woman of colour who has had her baby, Noé, but finds that the baby's father, who has just been released from a young offenders' institution and got a job in a garage, is testy and distant with Perla and his baby son. Jessica (Babette Verbeek) is pregnant, and – after her baby Alba is born – desperately seeking something like closure by trying to make contact with her own mother, Morgane (India Hair) who gave her up for fostering when she was Jessica's age. Julia (Elsa Houben) has been a homeless drug addict but with baby Mia is turning her life around in the home, with a traineeship at a hairdresser, and a caring boyfriend with whom she has some classic Dardenne scenes on a motor scooter, zooming down the street, that time-honoured movie realist trope for the freedom and vulnerability of the young. But perhaps the most complex figure is Ariane (Janaïna Halloy Fokan), a 15-year-old who wishes to give up baby Lili, to the rage of her own mum Nathalie (Christelle Cornil); in her anguish Nathalie wishes to be a grandma or even replacement mum, if Ariane doesn't want the baby – supposedly determined to quit her drinking and the abusive situations which made Ariane so determined not to go the same route. The babies-having-babies imagery is of course what makes this film so poignant – and also the realisation that the careworn older generation, still conflicted about the question of their own responsibility for all this and encumbered by their mistakes and the consequences of their choices, were in their teen daughters' situation so recently. Then there is the heart-wrenching sweetness of the babies themselves: baby Lili smiles tenderly at Ariane at a terribly ironic moment. What lies ahead for these children? The same thing, or something different? The film boils down to a fundamental question: having decided against abortion, is it more responsible, more loving, more heroically sacrificial in fact, to give up your baby for adoption? Or is it an existential failure of will, of courage, perpetuating a middle-class buyers' market in adoptive parenthood? There is of course no answer to be had, but there is faith in a better future here, and the final scene, involving the poem The Farewell by Apollinaire, is very moving. The Young Mother's Home screened at the Cannes film festival.
