Life Ahead: The Magic Of Experience
A life that ends and another that begins. Sophia Loren, aged 87, returns to the big screen to separate the talent from the beauty that one day her smooth skin could represent, to remind us, to the new generations, that behind the myth, the light and the pomp that surrounds her name artistic there was and is a great actress.
Madame Rosa, the character she embodies, is a woman with many years behind her whose job is to take care of the children of prostitutes who cannot directly take care of them. He does it from his particular way of understanding life, a medium in which the essential thing is to survive. He does it in a very particular way, since in the neighborhood, his house is known as “the refuge”.
His counterpoint is Momo (Ibrahima Gueye), a boy from Senegal who tries to distance himself from the memory of a mother he lost. At his young age, Momo has learned to make a living in the narrow streets of Bari, a coastal city in southern Italy. That’s what he pretends when he manages to steal some chandeliers from Madame Rosa, while she pretended to pawn them to get some money from him.
In search of hope
Until that moment, Dr. Cohen (Renato Carpentieri) has taken care of the minor, but upon discovering his latest robbery, he has the feeling that with his means he cannot redirect his existence. Thus, he takes advantage of his visit to Madame Rosa’s home to ask her to take care of him. She is reluctant at first. You have no desire to take care of a tree that has started to grow so crooked; you don’t feel up to facing that challenge.
Yet Dr. Cohen insists. It is a bit difficult for us as viewers to understand it. Madame Rose doesn’t seem like the most loving person in the world. How will two people who seem to put so much distance between each other meet?
Life ahead after the encounter
Few would bet on the match. At first, she thinks – and thus manifests it – that Momo is rotten inside; Besides, he thinks that that house is “a shit hole”. The two are seeing the surface, time will give them the opportunity to go further.
In the beginning, neither of the two has a desire for rapprochement. It is the very course of events, the need for affection that we all have, which ends up creating the relationship. Momo has the opportunity to enter what Madame Rose calls her refuge, to stop for a moment to listen to her memories. When the two identify as survivors, the distances are shortened.
Madame Rosa is the first important person to Momo, the first who is not insignificant in the midst of a humanity that looks like a comma. Their relationship changes when they first touch, the words are used to talk about the world, the contact to converge, to convey that one is there for the other.
Meanwhile, Momo has to choose between two forms of relationship, the one she has known so far with the “family” for whom she works as a drug dealer or her new home with Madame Rosa; see others as an instrument or see them as peers with needs.
In Life Ahead , Momo’s transformation is silent. He speaks through his choices, he shows himself as a person of his word when he leaves everything to fulfill the promise he makes to Madame Rosa. She will not let her die in the hospital, she will not let the disease strip her of what is for her an important part of her dignity. A dignity with which Momo remains to face his life ahead.
