Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Life Ahead’ on Netflix, an Italian Drama Marking the Exceptional Return of Sophia Loren

Netflix’s The Life Ahead gives us Sophia Loren’s first feature role in far, far too long, and everything else about the film must fall behind that, for obvious reasons. Most of us haven’t seen the Golden Age goddess since 2009’s Nine (and let’s be frank, hardly anybody saw that), and she emerges from what we assume is a grace-ridden retirement to star in a film directed by her son Edoardo Ponti, based on Romain Gary’s novel The Life Before Us, which was adapted into 1977’s Oscar-winning French feature Madame Rosa. I know, those last couple dozen words just read as BLAH BLAH BLAH because as soon as you saw “Loren” and “emerges from retirement,” your eyes went gauzy after being stricken with the mere thought of her talent and beauty. REVIEW SPOILER ALERT: She’s good in the film.

THE LIFE AHEAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) eyes an old woman in the street market. He easily snatches her bag and runs off, but he soons learns the elaborate candlesticks within are worthless on the black market. And Madame Rosa (Loren) is mad, because in her world, they were worth at least a month’s rent. Her apartment is also home to the children she babysits, including Jewish boy Iosif (Iosif Diego Pirvu) and the toddler son of her close friend, a sex worker named Lola (Abril Zamora). This is her tidy existence; she’s a Holocaust survivor with the tattoo on her wrist who sees herself in Iosif, and a former prostitute herself.

But Momo is destined to further disrupt her life. Coincidentally, the Senegalese orphan is under the supervision of Dr. Coen (Renato Carpentieri), Rosa’s friend. They return the candlesticks, and Dr. Coen asks her to take in the orphan boy, because he’s wayward and what the doctor has to offer him isn’t enough. She reluctantly agrees, and it costs him, because she’s in business, not philanthropy. Momo is serially disrespectful and prone to outbursts. “I do it my way,” he asserts. They quarrel. When Rosa complains to Coen, he points out her hypocrisy: “After what you’ve been through…” he says, and beneath her defensive dismissal, Loren savvily betrays a silent churn of emotions.

As these things inevitably go, Rosa and Momo find their commonalities trump their differences. He learns about her secret sanctum in the basement, where she goes to feel safe, and instinctively understands her, even though he ascribes no meaning to the word “Auschwitz.” She introduces him to Mr. Hamil (Babak Karimi), a shopkeeper hoping to get him in touch with his Islamic roots; Momo also convenes with a local crime lord, for whom he quite efficiently peddles drugs. Both Momo and Rosa are psychically triggered by scenes from the world around them. And then she starts wandering aimless into the countryside, or staring into the middle distance, unaware of the rainstorm that’s soaking her.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The characters and overall warmth here gives me probably illogical, but emotionally on-point Terms of Endearment vibes.

Performance Worth Watching: Please don’t make me pick between the classic-age superstar and the young actor with an ability to disarm us in a single line reading. She’s remarkable, never shying from her character’s nonverbal complexities; he is, as they say, a natural, sharply charismatic.

Memorable Dialogue: “Madame Rosa isn’t Jewish anymore. She’s just old,” Momo quite affectionately assesses.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Life Ahead is a lovely, lovely film — amusing, heartrending, poignant, a little messy and a little maudlin, but brimming with warmth and truth. It wisely sidesteps white savior tropes, mostly thanks to Loren, who injects enough prickly eccentricity into the character to avoid the type of patronizing no-he-saved-me slop that burdens lesser melodramas. The principal characters are marginalized peoples — trans, immigrants, demonized for their religion — finding snatches of hope and love in the midst of their struggles, and that’s what makes them an endearingly ramshackle family, poking each other tesitly but nursing each other’s most tender spots.

Some elements don’t work — the CGI lioness who manifests as the motherly presence Momo so desperately needs, or the toothless, half-realized threat of the influence of “the streets” on him. The gentle comedy is more memorable anyway. Iosef naively theorizes that Madame Rosa’s tattoo is evidence of her being a counterespionage agent who goes to her basement “Batcave” to do spy stuff. And not at all beside the point, if you’re going to draw parallels between Loren and superheroism, you’re not going to get any argument from me.

Ponti directs with an assured, delicately artful hand, allowing his characters to breathe and be raw and rife with contradictions, rarely letting superfluous bric-a-brac — say, a drippy score or diaphanous lighting — manipulate our emotions. That’s how you know the film is more truth than schmaltz, that it’s truly earning our honest emotional response. We all have our fragilities, and we should love each other for them, even when the life ahead is certain to be tragic.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Did I say The Life Ahead is a lovely, lovely film? Yes? Well, now I’ll say it’s a lovely, lovely, lovely film, a pleasant surprise that yanks a legit tear or three and restores a little bit of the goodness and warmth of humanity in us.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Life Ahead on Netflix