シングルマザーがシネマの新たな戦場になった理由

Early in Jasmin Gordon’s Swiss film The Courageous, single mother Jule (Ophélia Kolb) drives her three young children through stunning countryside to a nondescript commercial zone. In an empty cafe manned by an older woman, Jule buys a single drink for her brood then leaves for what she promises will be a quick errand. As the clock ticks, the cafe owner becomes increasingly suspicious, and the children are forced to assess their options before making the split-second decision to run. It’s the first of several nerve-shredding scenes in Gordon’s taut 80-minute film, which charts Jule’s misguided attempts to navigate her harsh reality in a country renowned for its wealth and order.

“It’s an extreme portrait of a woman in poverty with three children, trying to have this facade of perfection,” explains Gordon, who calls in from Switzerland. “I really wanted to go into that extreme and to create a film that, also, in terms of the form, is as tense as her interior life.” In a world where little empathy is extended to Jule, through the film, the audience is forced to imagine what it is to struggle – against the odds, and against time.

Blending elements of social realism and documentary with the propulsive pace of a thriller, The Courageous is one of several recent films depicting single motherhood as an adrenaline-fuelled high-wire act, where the stakes are sky high, empathy is in short supply and there is zero margin for error. Eric Gravel’s 2021 film Full Time, starring Kolb’s Call My Agent! co-star Laure Calamy, was a similarly adrenalised portrait of single motherhood. In it, Calamy plays Julie, a divorced mother of two whose day involves waking before dawn to get her children to their irritable childminder before hightailing it into Paris to work her exhausting job as head chambermaid in a luxury hotel. The routine begins to strain unbearably when Julie attempts to sneak out to an interview for a white-collar job in the midst of a citywide strike. Set to a pulsating electronic score, the action is on a perpetual knife edge, with every choice and every change in Julie’s precision timed schedule bringing a set of further complications. Respite, when it belatedly comes, is painfully brief.

It is impossible not to root for Jule and Julie, against whom the odds are so impossibly stacked and who make frequently dubious – and in the case of Jule, disastrous – decisions. Their choices are repeatedly called into question, as if it were possible, or it hadn’t occurred to either of them, to do things differently. Far from being a support, social services are a looming threat, another hostile system to either navigate or avoid. Among their cortisol-spiking sequences, The Courageous and Full Time ask what it means to be a ‘good’ mother in an unforgiving society.

Presented without judgment by Gordon’s naturalistic eye, the disarming Jule is nevertheless judged harshly by almost every other character in the film. Yet she desperately wants to make a happy, stable life for her children, or at least a show of it for them. “It was very important for me to talk about her isolation,” says Gordon. “When you’re struggling financially, I guess one of the last things you want is to lose your pride, and so it really is about her keeping up this facade and being in a world where people don’t have a lot of empathy for her.” 

Gordon’s own grandmother and great grandmother were single mums. “I guess those stories, in a subconscious way, resurfaced in this project – just how difficult it is to deal with how society sees you,” she says. “Of course, in the past, it was much more extreme than today, [but] being a woman alone with children is still very stigmatised.” Given this, it is unsurprising that, in her desperation and frustration, Jule decides she’s had enough of playing by the rules.

The strictures of the UK’s welfare system are explored in Daisy-May Hudson’s film Lollipop, released over the summer. Like Jule, single mother Molly makes some desperate decisions, including taking her children on the run across a series of fraught scenes. However ill-conceived, Molly’s actions are always taken out of love for her children as well as from the stress of being perpetually cornered. But by building a home with an old friend and coming to work with the care system, she eventually regains her foothold in life.

It’s a state of grace explored in Young Mothers, the latest film from filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, which follows a group of teenage girls living with their newborns in a state home for new mums. There, they are looked after and schooled in motherhood by caring social workers away from the perils and pressures of the unfeeling world outside. Less frenetic than The Courageous or Full Time, the tension here comes from the girls’ demonstrable vulnerability, and what it leaves them open to. Their circumstances are painful, often desperate, but in this lovely, moving film, each of these girls is given the reprieve from unrelenting pressure that they – and all of these mothers – deserve.                

The Courageous and Young Mothers are out in UK cinemas now.

Early in Jasmin Gordon’s Swiss film The Courageous, single mother Jule (Ophélia Kolb) drives her three young children through stunning countryside to a nondescript commercial zone. In an empty cafe manned by an older woman, Jule buys a single drink for her brood then leaves for what she promises will be a quick errand. As the clock ticks, the cafe owner becomes increasingly suspicious, and the children are forced to assess their options before making the split-second decision to run. It’s the first of several nerve-shredding scenes in Gordon’s taut 80-minute film, which charts Jule’s misguided attempts to navigate her harsh reality in a country renowned for its wealth and order.

“It’s an extreme portrait of a woman in poverty with three children, trying to have this facade of perfection,” explains Gordon, who calls in from Switzerland. “I really wanted to go into that extreme and to create a film that, also, in terms of the form, is as tense as her interior life.” In a world where little empathy is extended to Jule, through the film, the audience is forced to imagine what it is to struggle – against the odds, and against time.

Blending elements of social realism and documentary with the propulsive pace of a thriller, The Courageous is one of several recent films depicting single motherhood as an adrenaline-fuelled high-wire act, where the stakes are sky high, empathy is in short supply and there is zero margin for error. Eric Gravel’s 2021 film Full Time, starring Kolb’s Call My Agent! co-star Laure Calamy, was a similarly adrenalised portrait of single motherhood. In it, Calamy plays Julie, a divorced mother of two whose day involves waking before dawn to get her children to their irritable childminder before hightailing it into Paris to work her exhausting job as head chambermaid in a luxury hotel. The routine begins to strain unbearably when Julie attempts to sneak out to an interview for a white-collar job in the midst of a citywide strike. Set to a pulsating electronic score, the action is on a perpetual knife edge, with every choice and every change in Julie’s precision timed schedule bringing a set of further complications. Respite, when it belatedly comes, is painfully brief.

It is impossible not to root for Jule and Julie, against whom the odds are so impossibly stacked and who make frequently dubious – and in the case of Jule, disastrous – decisions. Their choices are repeatedly called into question, as if it were possible, or it hadn’t occurred to either of them, to do things differently. Far from being a support, social services are a looming threat, another hostile system to either navigate or avoid. Among their cortisol-spiking sequences, The Courageous and Full Time ask what it means to be a ‘good’ mother in an unforgiving society.

Presented without judgment by Gordon’s naturalistic eye, the disarming Jule is nevertheless judged harshly by almost every other character in the film. Yet she desperately wants to make a happy, stable life for her children, or at least a show of it for them. “It was very important for me to talk about her isolation,” says Gordon. “When you’re struggling financially, I guess one of the last things you want is to lose your pride, and so it really is about her keeping up this facade and being in a world where people don’t have a lot of empathy for her.” 

Gordon’s own grandmother and great grandmother were single mums. “I guess those stories, in a subconscious way, resurfaced in this project – just how difficult it is to deal with how society sees you,” she says. “Of course, in the past, it was much more extreme than today, [but] being a woman alone with children is still very stigmatised.” Given this, it is unsurprising that, in her desperation and frustration, Jule decides she’s had enough of playing by the rules.

The strictures of the UK’s welfare system are explored in Daisy-May Hudson’s film Lollipop, released over the summer. Like Jule, single mother Molly makes some desperate decisions, including taking her children on the run across a series of fraught scenes. However ill-conceived, Molly’s actions are always taken out of love for her children as well as from the stress of being perpetually cornered. But by building a home with an old friend and coming to work with the care system, she eventually regains her foothold in life.

It’s a state of grace explored in Young Mothers, the latest film from filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, which follows a group of teenage girls living with their newborns in a state home for new mums. There, they are looked after and schooled in motherhood by caring social workers away from the perils and pressures of the unfeeling world outside. Less frenetic than The Courageous or Full Time, the tension here comes from the girls’ demonstrable vulnerability, and what it leaves them open to. Their circumstances are painful, often desperate, but in this lovely, moving film, each of these girls is given the reprieve from unrelenting pressure that they – and all of these mothers – deserve.                

The Courageous and Young Mothers are out in UK cinemas now.