In a spectacular return to form, the Dardenne brothers bring empathy and dignity to ill-equipped teen mums looking for a brighter future amid drug addiction and social hardship
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he Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, have long functioned as a Belgian answer to Ken Loach, pitching their film-making camp among the most marginalised and forgotten. Normally this means clear-eyed fables of teenagers and twentysomethings living in difficult circumstances: nightmare parents, petty crime, drugs and jail. In a series of films between the mid-90s and early-10s, they twice won the Palme d’Or, plus the best screenplay and the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival for their distinctive brand of naturalist storytelling, employing a light-on-its-feet handheld travelling-camera style to deal with some seriously dark material. Then came bit of a wobble; perhaps their success opened up opportunities they couldn’t turn down. They found themselves working with an actual film star (Marion Cotillard) and then turned to hot-button issues – radical Islamism in Young Ahmed, illegal immigration in Tori and Lokita – which perhaps didn’t bring the best out of them.
