Monday, December 7, 2020



Sophia Loren is 86 years old, and in her latest film, Netflix's The Life Ahead, she shares the screen with 12-year-old Ibrahima Gueye in a story that affirmed for this viewer our capacity for goodness and grace, despite our superficial differences and individual traumas. What a welcome message!


Loren plays Madame Rosa, an aged prostitute and Auschwitz survivor living in a city on the coast of Italy, where she cares for the abandoned children of local hookers. Gueye, in his first feature film, plays Momo, the drug-dealing son of a murdered Senegalese streetwalker who ends up in Rosa's care after a kindly neighborhood physician (Renato Carpentieri) asks her to tend to the angry and defiant boy for a short time. His hope is she will be able to salvage what cruelty and abandonment have left.

While the arc of the story is familiar, director Edoardo Ponti (Loren's son) takes a fresh turn at guiding his endearing collection of characters to the film's inevitable conclusion. Most important are a transwoman hooker (Abril Zamora), who is the surrogate mother to another abandoned child, and a generous Muslim shopkeeper (Babak Karimi), who, at Rosa's request, helps Momo mend his faith in God and people.

The film, which is in Italian, is enormously affecting, the scenes between a still radiant Loren and Gueye, who possesses untouched youthful beauty, are moving and memorable.

No comments:

Sing Sing

  Indie writer / director Greg Kwedar's Sing Sing stars powerhouse player Colman Domingo (Rustin) as wrongfully imprisoned "Divine ...