Film Review: The Life Ahead
Cover image courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes.
The Life Ahead (Italian, La vita davanti a sé), directed by Edoardo Ponti, starring his mother Sophia Loren, with Ibrahima Gueye, Babik Karimi, and Abril Zamora, is a non-Hollywood, non-mainstream movie, showing the power of how stories, apparently on the sidelines, can convey richly authentic relationships.
No main characters are native-born Italian Catholics. Loren plays Rosa, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor, who cares for abandoned children. After a conflicted start, when the character Mo Mo (Mohammed), played by Gueye, aggressively steals candlesticks from Rosa, she reluctantly takes him in. Mo Mo, a teenaged Senegalese immigrant, speaks perfect Italian. The tension and distrust between them slowly grows into mutual accommodation, then subtle affection. Both of these actors have very subtle facial expressions that show this gradual change of feelings towards one another. In order to capture these facial expressions, the camera is relatively static throughout the film, which helps the audience focus on the characters. These characters were fascinating to me: each one is complex and believable. Bari, a gritty coastal city, sets the stage. Although mainstream movies, including some from Loren’s career, pay homage to Rome, Naples, and Venice, we never see a harsh place like Bari. Overhead drone shots bring Bari into the story.
No characters are perfect. Hollywood loves its good and evil characters, with good prevailing and evil punished. This movie feels unsentimental, neither judging Mo Mo nor making him a saint, which truly honors his life more. Rosa, along with Babil, an Algerian Muslim immigrant (played by Karimi) who teaches Mo Mo the craft of rug repair, nudges him toward a good path, yet he remains isolated at the local school. Mo Mo meets a drug dealer who offers him respect for his entrepreneurial hustle and money to buy the motorbike of his dreams.
The characters are not trivialized into stereotypes. One character, whose child Rosa watches, is Lola, a Spanish transgender woman played by Zamora. In Hollywood films, her transgender identity might become a focus, even a political statement. Here, she is just a person in the neighborhood, who happens to be transgender, caring for Mo Mo amid her own struggles. That makes a more powerful statement.
Finally, this film tells a sad story without sentimentality. Hollywood films would add a melancholy piano track, leaving me feeling manipulated. Here, the film helps me feel the tough or gentle moments. Rosa is aging and blanks out when she retreats to her traumatic past, not tragically, but as a stage in her hard life. There are unexpected joys. Mo Mo liberates Rosa from the hospital in her wheelchair to visit favorite spots along the coast, with the quiet sense of freedom we saw when he rode his new motorbike, using many wide shots to enhance this moment. The movie ends with no sense of what “life ahead” will be for Mo Mo. The unanswered question and all the tension of his possible choices remain. In Italian, the movie title implies “Life Ahead of Him,” and there is life ahead, but his path is unknown at the end, just as it was at the beginning.
I give this movie five stars for its gritty realism, moving character portrayals, use of cinematography to enhance the story, and emotional depth.
Final Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
