The Life Ahead

The Life Ahead (La vita davanti a sé)

Directed by: Edoardo Ponti Cast: Sophia Loren, Renato Carpentieri, Francesco Cassano, Ibrahima Gueye

There is something rather beautiful about seeing Sophia Loren, now 86 years old, on the screen again! (With an added bonus of a Neapolitan accent, so reminiscent of her early films). Her presence in the film is enough of a hook and her performance is enough to earn the 3 stars seal of approval, but actually I thought that the real revelation is the little boy, Ibrahima Gueye, whose range of emotion lights up the whole film.Unfortunately both Gueye and Loren work with aslightly forced script, riddled with clichés and predictable which most likely suffers from being condensed from larger and more nuanced story in the original book.The film is directed by Sophia Loren’s own son, Edorado Ponti and it’s a remake of a French Oscar winning film from the 1977 (Madame Rosa). It’s definitely a flawed film: for example I didn’t buy the voice over, which felt like it was coming from a different character as the one I was watching on the screen, I found some of the behavior changes of the main characters a bit too abrupt and I never had a sense of time passing.There were lots of potentially very interesting characters but the film only seem to scratch the surface.However, having said all that, here and there were glimpses of pure poetry and beauty. Little gems, tiny moments which I found surprising and heart-warming which somehow made me forgive the so-so rest.

You can stream this on Netflix