Movie Review: The Life Ahead Mourns The Past
Watching The Life Ahead, I couldn’t help but think of the American election, and how it shows our world is divided. Yet, divisions are not simply born in prejudice or fear, but in the desire for power: something even the most liberal, loving or conservative, discriminatory person shares, which makes their capacity to grow dangerously capped. A leader rises in seeing those caps and either erasing them to elevate the people or furthering them to elevate himself. The beauty of The Life Ahead is that it is about two people that have lived under leaders or conditions that did the former and how in the same way horrors can be similar, in details, so can healing and hope.
The Life Ahead | Official Trailer | Netflix
Out on Netflix November 6, personally, I don’t know how much strength Americans will have to watch anything beyond the election chaos. Yet, The Life Ahead is a stunning, quiet reminder of how much we have in common in terms of our pain and our desperation to not feel It anymore. Sophia Loren plays Madame Rosa, and MY GOD is she a presence. To see such a legend on screen is like witnessing grace touch upon earth. What I love about her character and performance is that there is an aged, “Mary Magdalene” dynamic to her. Although untrue historically, Mary Magdalene is often portrayed as a reformed prostitute, of which Christ’s love exorcizes her demons and helps her move on from the memory of them. In some ways, that is what Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) does for this former prostitute who takes care of orphaned children living in the street, but whose worsening dementia warps her back to the trauma and torture she experienced in the Holocaust.
Laura Pausini – Io sì (Seen) [From The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé)] (Official Video)
The movie thrives off the mutual necessity Momo and Madame Rosa find in each other. Gueye is amazing as the 12 year old, Senegalese orphan whose life of constantly surviving the streets has made him both wise and wounded beyond his years. Although you know that he is kid, he is a little adult with how he maneuvers through the world just to live another day. Watching him, I kept on feeling heartbreak because I wanted him to be a child and enjoy child things, but, like Madame Rosa, you can be born into a world or a status that doest not allow you to be a kid or even human. In this, Loren emanates a maternal warmth that grows for Momo, who she initially judges and tries to toss aside as a hopeless cause. Yet, in time, her recalls of her past sprout to build her compassion for Momo’s present. Sure, they may not be living in 1938 Germany, but the world still struggles to be kind to the needy and not place them in further need.
Directed by Edoardo Ponti with writer Ugo Chiti adapting Romain Gary’s novel, The Life Before Us, the movie is carried by its actors and the dreamy cuts and gritted close-ups of their characters’ pain. These are two people unwilling to suffer continued loss, but life is suffering. Thus, their bond rivets audiences in their quest to find some joy amidst the hurt.
