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Sophia Loren: the very name evokes the glorious primary colors of the glamor of the early 60’s. In her pomp she was one of the most famous women in the world, the star of a thousand magazine covers, courted by Hollywood, who nicknamed her “the Italian Marilyn Monroe ”, whatever that means. He went there to star in movies with John Wayne, William Holden and Cary Grant, with whom he had an affair. But she didn’t care about California and went back to Italy to marry producer Carlo Ponti and make some memorable movies (Yesterday Today and Tomorrow, Italian style marriage).
Although he hasn’t made a movie in over a decade, his fame hasn’t waned, particularly in Italy, where he has achieved near-royal status. Maybe a queen, but Loren’s background wasn’t real, and she goes back to her roots in The life ahead, a good-hearted drama with touches of social realism directed by his son, Eduardo Ponti.
The action takes place in Bari, the salty city in the south where the former prostitute Madame Rosa (Loren) lives a precarious retirement in a run-down area of the city. She makes a living taking care of the children of other prostitutes, but this seems more like a vocation than a job, since Rosa is severely dedicated to them, teaches them Hebrew (she is Jewish) and does everything possible to put them on the right path. . But his latest job, a Senegalese orphan named Momo (Ibrahimo Gueye), is quite complicated.
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Help is at hand: Momo (Ibrahimo Gueye) and Rosa (Sophia Loren) in ‘The Life Ahead’. Photo: Netflix
Their first encounter is not auspicious, as Momo steals Rosa’s purse at the market, knocking her down just in case. When Momo’s guardian, a friendly local doctor, brings him to Rosa’s house to atone for him, the boy’s apology is sullen. But Rosa agrees, for a fee, to take Momo in temporarily.
She is assuming more than she thinks, because Momo is already in the service of a drug dealer, who sends him to Bari night with a backpack full of low-quality narcotics. But Rosa may suspect that Momo is being sucked into the dark side, so she gets him a part-time job with a local merchant (Bakak Karimi), a friendly Muslim and, in Rosa’s opinion, “the wisest man I’ve ever seen. known”.
Slowly, with commendable patience, you will break through Momo’s tough outer shell and show the child that there is more to life than rushing and acting tough. Rosa also realizes that there is more to Momo than meets the eye: a bond is formed, and he will eventually dare to ask her about a small blue numbered tattoo on her arm. For Rosa, she is a survivor of a camp, who knows very well what it is like to lose her family to violence.
So many harsh life lessons in Eduardo Ponti’s film, which despite occasional lapses in sentiment, gives few blows when describing the lives of children who are unlucky enough to fall through safety nets and end up on the street. Momo is a born survivor, but even he speaks sadly at night about how his father killed his beloved mother, condemning the boy to this vagabond life.
Rosa seems to understand all this intuitively and finally decides that there is a child who can be trusted. Their relationship forms the poignant core of The life ahead, and while Ibrahimo Gueye does well as a kid, and there are some nice supporting cameos, no one can expect to share a scene with Sophia Loren and stay visible for long.
Wearing large hoop earrings and her long flowing gray hair, she struts around town like a wise gypsy from the south, standing tall and not disturbing anyone. Rosa’s health is failing and she is beginning to faint, but her strength is deep and her love for the boy is even more poignant as it is masked by brusqueness. Loren is wonderful as the tough and resourceful Rosa, and uses her husky voice and huge eyes to hint at the suffering the woman has overcome.
Eduardo Ponti competently tells a fairly simple story, although one could have done so without occasional interruptions from an imagined and symbolic CGI lioness. Who needs fake lionesses when there’s a real one on hand? Loren holds this film together by sheer force of personality, and it’s impossible to imagine it was made without her.
Amazon, iTunes, Sky Store, etc., 91 minutes
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Love Story: Harry (Travis Fimmel) and Molly (Rachael Taylor) in ‘Finding Steve McQueen’
To be clear, no real Steve McQueens appears in this story, a jovial criminal prank set in the early 1970s and based on a true story. Harry Barber (Travis Fimmel) is a not-so-bright Ohio factory worker with a string of driving tickets who idolizes McQueen. His pride and joy is a 1968 Ford Mustang like the one McQueen drove at Bullitt, and his sleek handling attracts the attention of his dubious employer, Enzo Rotella (William Fitchtner), who is planning a great job.
Enzo hates Richard Nixon and has heard of a re-election campaign bribery fund languishing in a California bank. That’s dirty money, he acknowledges, and it has to be stolen. Their daring foray brings in $ 9 million, but will they get away with it? Mark Steven Johnson’s movie is rough around the edges, and a love story between Harry and Molly Murphy (Rachael Taylor) isn’t as charming as it sounds. But the tone is light, the dialogue is often funny, and William Fichtner is very funny as the irritable Enzo. “Here Harry,” he announces at one point, “is the only one of you with a modicum of intelligence.” “What’s a minimum,” Harry asks.
Curzon Home Theater, 78 minutes
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Lisa Blohm and Pär Fredriksson in ‘About Endlessness’
Swedish iconoclast Roy Andersson is at his mischievous prime in this invigorating drama, comprised of a series of vignettes that attempt nothing less than to summarize the human condition. There’s more than a hint of Beckettian despair in About Endlessness, but as with Beckett, the sadness is fermented with invigorating doses of black humor. A Lutheran priest hits the bottle, in the middle of a crisis of faith. His doctor tells him that “he may be content to be alive.” Good advice, unless you are a priest
Moments of beauty and goodness are juxtaposed with the terrors of human cruelty. At one point, an old man looks out a cafe window at the falling snow and is overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene: “Fantastic!” yell out loud. But snow also falls on a column of ragged prisoners marching into Siberia, an indication of the ever-present threat of societies collapsing into totalitarianism, that threat made flesh by a surreal visit to Hitler’s bunker. In this extraordinary film, Andersson captures humanity in all its nuances: big, small, vicious, kind, generous, petty. And the general tone is one of acceptance.
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