James Cagney came out of a 20-year retirement, for his final great role in 1981’s Ragtime.
Audrey Hepburn returned from semi-retirement after 1967’s Wait Until Dark, for 1976’s Robin and Marian and a few more choice roles.
Cary Grant stayed retired after 1966’s Walk, Don’t Run (more’s the pity).
Although knowing full well how he spends his daytime hours, Madame Rosa (Sophia
Loren) soon sees something worth saving in the tough young street kid (Ibrahima
Gueye) who has been thrust into her life.
And now Sophia Loren, 86 years young, has returned to cinema after a decade-long absence. The lure: The Life Ahead, debuting on Netflix. It’s a fresh adaptation of Romain Gary’s 1975 novel, The Life Before Us, which won the Foreign Language Academy Award when filmed in 1977 as Madame Rosa.
The additional lure: This new version is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti.
They do each other proud.
The setting is seaside Naples, more or less in the present day. Even so, Ponti and cinematographer Angus Hudson maintain an atmosphere of vagueness; absent the presence of cell phones, this could be 10, 20 years ago. The nature of the story is similarly timeless; the script — by Ugo Chiti, Fabio Natale and Ponti — quietly emphasizes the universality of relationships, trust and kindness.
The elderly Madame Rosa (Loren) is a former prostitute who, with the assistance of a local doctor (Renato Carpentieri, as Dr. Coen), has made a second career of caring for the abandoned — or orphaned — children of sex workers. Such placements are intended to be temporary: only until each child can be sent to a safer, more permanent environment.
Her current charges are Iosif (Iosif Diego Pirvu), an adolescent she’s teaching to read and speak Hebrew; and the toddler daughter of Lola (Abril Zamora), a trans prostitute who’s a close friend. This little network of allies also includes Hamil (Babk Karimi), a shopkeeper who respects Madame Rosa for her selfless work.
She has performed this valuable service for years and years: long enough that some of her former “wards” have become the police officers who tacitly leave her alone, when rousting other “undesirables” from the neighborhood.
She’s mugged one day by Momo (Ibrahima Gueye), a brazen 12-year-old street kid who — in one of those coincidences favored by stories of this sort — happens to be Dr. Coen’s latest “project.” He coaxes truth from the boy, and thus is able to return Madame Rosa’s stolen property. And then — salt in the wound! — he asks her to take temporary charge of Momo: a proposal that dismays both of them.
Give it time, Dr. Coen pleads; there’s some good in the boy. She isn’t sure about that. (Neither are we.)
