The Life Ahead

This adaptation of La Vie devant Soi takes the tactic of the film Transit – adapting a film about a woman living in the aftermath of the Shoah in France and her relationship with a Muslim boy – and transfers it into a seaside town in present day Italy. All good and well, and the spirit is in the right place in a lot of ways, but Edoardo Ponti's film is trite. We don't spend enough time with the characters really to love them, and the entire thing operates on the idea that we know every move before it happens, as if giving us familiar tropes were the same thing as emotional investment. I didn't find this affecting at all, although it did make me want to rewatch Moshé Mizrahi's excellent 1977 film.

La Vie devant Soi

La Vie devant Soi might be my favorite movie of 1978. That's kind of a difficult claim to make 40 years later, so I'm having trouble committing, but this film is gorgeous. I absolutely loved it. The movie stars (the incomparable) Simone Signoret as Madame Rosa, an aged prostitute and survivor of the Shoah who now takes care of prostitutes' children during the week so that they can work.

The movie, like all Moshé Mizrahi movies, is actually, however, about a young boy coming of age. One of the kids that Madame Rosa has taken in is a boy whose parents were Muslim, and his parents never come back for him, so he and Madame Rosa stick it out together as she grows old and infirm and he becomes a young teenager.

This is easily Mizrahi's best film, and this one manages to cover so many intriguing topics and describe so many fascinating characters. I found it beautiful and very moving even if I have become impatient with Mizrahi's greater interest in young men coming of age than the women in those boys' lives. (The women in his films always seem more interesting to me, but Mizrahi's movies are less interested in them.)

As for Simone Signoret (1921-1985), La Vie devant Soi is a crowning achievement in a long and superb career.

The Briefest of Reviews from 1972

Moshé Mizrahi's movie I Love You Rosa (אני אוהב אותך רוזה) is no great shakes, but it is charming in its way. Like Mizrahi's subsequent film The House on Chelouche Street, I Love You Rosa focuses on a small boy. In fact, this purports to be a kind of feminist tale about freedom and liberty, in which a young woman decides to choose for herself and convinces the man in her life to let her choose, whereupon she chooses (and this is never in doubt) precisely the thing everyone wishes for her to choose. I found all of this to be a bit of a red herring. And the film is much much more interested in the young man than it is in Rosa herself, no matter how much it claims to love her. The film is also bookended by a completely superfluous framing device. Still, it's a likable picture.
(Apparently this movie is available on DVD in a dubbed version. But I watched it in Hebrew on an ancient VHS copy with English subtitles.)

The Briefest of Reviews from 1973

This poster is for a movie called The House on Chelouche Street, which I thought was good. I didn't love it, though, and one of the reasons I didn't love it was that it is a coming-of-age story about a fifteen-year-old boy. I think that I might be losing patience with coming-of-age narratives, or at least coming-of-age narratives that deal with young people with very little self awareness. The main character of this film is so young that I found it hard to identify. It's not that I'm exclusively interested in films about adults, now, but films about young people have been difficult for me to drop into these days.