Lovely late flourish from Loren the lioness
The Life Ahead (15 cert, 94 min) ★★★ ★★
Dir Edoardo Ponti
Starring Sophia Loren, Ibrahima Gueye, Renato Carpentieri, Abril Zamora, Massimiliano Rossi
What does it take to coax an icon like Sophia Loren out of retirement? Being a direct blood relative presumably doesn’t hurt. Loren’s first film performance in more than a decade is the main – though by no means only – attraction in this amiable slice-ofstreet-life drama directed and co-written by her son Edoardo Ponti. An Italian-ised adaptation of a French-language novel by Romain Gary, it follows a Jewish Holocaust survivor, Madame Rosa, who runs an informal foster care service for the children of local prostitutes, having retired from the profession herself some time ago.
With her trademark air of sultry, weather-blown defiance, the 86-year-old Loren of course plays Rosa herself – gliding through the film like a regal lioness in winter, and revving the R at the start of her name like the beginnings of a cautionary roar.
The setting is the graffiti-stippled city of Bari in Puglia, where 12-year-old Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) is about to reluctantly become Rosa’s latest charge. An orphaned Senegalese refugee, he’s fallen in with a local drug gang led by the weaselly Ruspa (Massimiliano Rossi), and swipes Rosa’s handbag in a busy marketplace, making off with two candlesticks.
Momo’s current carer, a local doctor (Renato Carpentieri), makes the tyke return the loot, and suggests to Rosa that she look after him. It’s an idea of which neither party is immediately enamoured: “I’m not staying with that whore!” Momo snaps, while Rosa describes the boy as “rotten to the core”, and darkly suggests he might slit the rest of the household’s throats in the night. Even so, she takes him in – and sure enough, a bond forms between this Jewish former prostitute and Muslim refugee which transcends generations and cultures, while remaining tidily inside the expected boundaries of a story of this type.
The plot’s various sentimental dips and swerves all arrive as predictably as if you’ve been watching them approach on a satnav. Yet even so, they’re pretty affecting, thanks both to Loren and Gueye’s involving screen chemistry and the film’s sturdy commitment to showing their world as it is, with every sugary detail counterbalanced by a sprinkling of grit. Colourful fringe characters abound – notably Lola (Abril Zamora), Rosa’s jolly transsexual neighbour – but a scene in which Momo watches other refugee children being separated from their mothers exudes a grim chill, and Rosa’s own late-life slide into dementia and ongoing battle with her memories of Auschwitz are movingly played. Perhaps The Life Ahead feels devised as a career-closing encore first and foremost. But the unbridled pleasure of seeing a Loren encore is not to be sniffed at. Available on Netflix from today