OVP: The Life Ahead (2020)

Film: The Life Ahead (2020)

Stars: Sophia Loren, Ibrahima Gueye, Abril Zamora, Renato Carpentieri, Babak Karimi

Director: Eduardo Ponti

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Io Si")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Earlier this year, you may recall, we devoted an entire month to Sophia Loren for our Saturdays with the Stars series, and in it we ended in 1977.  But Loren continued acting, and unlike most of the stars we've featured in that series, still works, albeit quite irregularly.  Her son Eduardo Ponti convinced her to come out of retirement for this movie, a recreation of the novel The Life Before Us, which was also made into a big-screen adaptation in 1977 with Simone Signoret playing the same part that Loren does here.  As a result, we're revisiting Sophia before our year closes, a fitting signifier that perhaps more than any sex symbol we've talked about this year, her stardom was able to sustain through multiple different phases of the movies, starting in the early 1950's with Italian cinema, and making it all-the-way to the streaming era.

(Spoilers Ahead) The picture, while it stars Loren, does not put her in the center of its plot.  Instead, that figure is Momo (Gueye), a young orphan boy who commits petty crimes & has started to deal drugs when he is brought by his benefactor Dr. Cohen (Carpentieri) to Madame Rosa (Loren).  Rosa is an aging woman who was once a prostitute, but in the years since has taken it upon herself to care for the children of prostitutes.  Initially Rosa & Momo dislike one another, but they grow to have an appreciation for each other, with Momo learning that Rosa was a Holocaust survivor, a period of her life that still haunts her as she drifts in and out of states of dementia.  The movie watches as the roles shift, with Momo fighting those around him to take care of Rosa as she is hospitalized, and eventually he breaks her out so she can die at home.

The Life Ahead is a simple story, one that's been told not just in iterations of Romain Gary's novel, but just in general.  We all can name a dozen "older person befriends child, both of them learning from the experience" movies off the top of our heads, and The Life Ahead doesn't break any ground on this front. If anything, it stays too closely in the lines, with very little struggle in the end; the drug dealer that Momo is dealing with lets go of his successful dealer with shocking ease, and while this is refreshing that it doesn't invite cliche, it also lacks a lot of stakes for the young man.

The thing that elevates the movie is Loren's work as Rosa.  She's only in a third of the movie, if that (I didn't have my stopwatch out), and one suspects if she wasn't Sophia Loren, the "Last Golden Age Movie Star" we might be seeing a supporting play here (it borders between lead/supporting in a similar way to Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers last year), but she makes her mark.  Loren is so iconic, her beauty so ingrained in movie memories, that she uses that to quickly establish her character in the opening scenes, and then invite us into her own world.  There's an authenticity in the way that she remembers her childhood, the hardness of her youth, and the way that she sustains the fears from the concentration camp.  Loren is a confident performer, a movie star but also a serious actress, and she guides us through the horrors of her life, & the fears she has for losing her memories, and dying.  It's a studied piece of work, one lovingly gifted to her by her son, and the best she's been in decades.