Sophia Loren (alone) cannot save “the next life”

We always saw Sophia Loren in her old apartments. Leaning against the kitchen door, her body bent, her arms crossed. She shakes her head slightly with pride and clear determination. She looks at what is happening in front of her without saying a word. In his previous films, this pose is a pause of doubt as to whether he should believe what he sees. He stood like this and looked at the men with murderous looks, and they offered their vows of love. In his new film “The Next Life” (2020 – directed by Eduardo Ponte), the attitude has not changed, and the suspicion is still present, but not with a man, but with a twelve-year-old boy.

Once upon a time, Madame Rosa (Sophia Loren) worked as a prostitute. But that was so much time ago. Today she takes care of the children of prostitutes who no longer have a home. Dr. Cohen (Renato Carpentieri) once asked him to take care of Momo (Ibrahima Goy), a Senegalese Muslim boy. At first, she refused, especially since her first meeting with Momo was very difficult. But in the end, she agreed. However, there are no signs of peace between them. Over and over again, Momo causes trouble for him due to his rebellion and his clandestine sale of drugs. But over time, he becomes interested in the old woman, who seems to have a great secret to hide.
Thanks to the resurgence of Sophia Loren ten years after her last film, to her son Eduardo Ponte. The latter directed and co-wrote the film “The Next Life” (their third work together). The story is not your story, but belongs to someone else, Roman Gary, who wrote the novel in 1975 and published it under the pseudonym Emile Agar and won the prestigious French “Goncourt” award for it. Ponte changed the story a bit: the story takes place today in Italy, and the Algerian boy has become Senegalese, along with a few other details. Of course, the basic structure remained the same. It’s still about Rosa, a former prostitute who has painful memories of the Holocaust and a boy struggling with life as a foreigner. So there are two people on the margins of society, who were able to support each other. But above all, it is necessary to overcome various obstacles and build trust, a point that both find difficult due to their experiences.
The story, in essence, deals with the integration and acceptance of the other, and in this case this integration is not purely social, but is mainly related to the integration of the prisoners through the search for the warmth of a kind of family. However, the film amounts to clear and pedantic educational speech. It spins safely and each scene can be predicted from start to finish. We can even leave the movie for half an hour and come back, no wonder. You can even start with the movie in the middle or from the scenes of the last twenty minutes, or it is best to only follow the scenes where Lauren is on screen.
Ponti insisted on warning our faces with tolerance and compassion, preferring to use outdated melodramatic tones. The movie struggles to get to all of the topics covered, and the various sub-stories slip by without a specific direction popping up and suddenly disappearing. The director does not have the dynamic ability to develop characters and allow the viewer to enter the story.

Eduardo Ponti insisted on shaking his face with tolerance and compassion, preferring to use old-fashioned melodramatic tones.

He did not have a well-defined style: he combined acceptance of others, the Holocaust, prostitution, transsexuality, immigrants, violence from the authorities, the difference between religions, drug trafficking and family ties, and walked with them in the fingertips, moving away from the bowels of Italian realistic cinema and plunging into the mud of sentimentality. Too many topics and little time. Even the relationship between Rosa and Momo was given little time. The friendship and familiarity that existed at some point, we did not know exactly how it happened.
The best thing about the movie is sure Sophia Loren, but she alone can’t save a bad movie. We see the 86-year-old woman in a dazzling glow, just as her eyes still seem to stare directly into our hearts. The years did not scratch the tenderness with which Sophia Loren used to occupy the screen. An immortal actress knows how to be credible in the role of Mrs. Rosa, who takes care of others before her, despite her age and many problems. The only good thing about the movie is that we get to see Sophia Loren once again nominated for an Oscar for best actress.

* Life ahead on Netflix

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