In Sophia Loren’s Oscar-tipped new movie she’s an Auschwitz survivor, battling dementia. Which sounds like the first line of a Ricky Gervais gag. Need I quote Gervais’s two pillars of wisdom? “You’re guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental” and “Do a Holocaust movie and the awards come!”
The big surprise: Loren’s performance is truly moving (and far more subtle than her turn in Two Women, for which she won a Best Actress Oscar in 1962). Here, she plays Italian-Jewish Madame Rosa, a former prostitute, whose tiny flat in the port of Bari is full of children, including cynical Senegalese orphan, Momo (Ibrahima Gueye). Blazingly alive, even when catatonic, Rosa might be dismissed as a mother courage. In Loren’s wiry hands, she is something much more disturbing: a lank-haired lady Lazarus, with venom to spare.
Not one shot is designed to make us think the 86-year-old is “still” beautiful. All sex symbols get compared to their younger selves and it’s refreshing to see an icon give the finger to glamour — Loren’s face is a Botox-free zone. Yet she’s the opposite of ugly. In fact, the wonderfulness of her craggy nose made me want to whoop out loud.
Director Edoardo Ponti is Loren’s son. Is that why she lets his camera get so close? Charlotte Rampling displayed the same lack of inhibition in the presence of offspring, Barnaby Southcombe, when making I, Anna. There’s some-thing faintly incestuous about a man dwelling this intently on his mum, but, for the audience, it pays off. By the way, the film’s not all about Loren/Rosa. Thanks to gifted newcomer, Gueye, Momo’s interior life is as convincing as his older co-star’s.
Minor characters, too, prove three-dimensional. A charismatic drug dealer is never lazily presented as the villain, while a saintly local businessman, rightly proud of his and Momo’s Muslim roots, is shockingly rigid on the subject of interfaith unions. The Life Ahead is based on a novel by Romain Gary that has already been turned into an Oscar-winning movie. But that doesn’t mean Ponti is guilty of overkill. We live in wicked times. A survey in the UK, last year, discovered one in 12 believe that the scale of the Holocaust has been exaggerated. Some stories are worth repeating and Gary’s story, in particular, never gets old.
15, 94 minutes. Streaming on Netflix now
