94 min | PG-13 | November 6, 2020 | Netflix
Sophia Loren returns to the screen as Madame Rosa, an aging Holocaust survivor who minds the children of prostitutes in a seaside Italian city. A twelve-year-old Senegalese boy robs her, then ends up living under her roof. Two people the world threw away decide to keep each other.
Madame Rosa is an elderly Jewish woman in the coastal city of Bari. She survived Auschwitz. She worked the streets. Now she takes in the children of local prostitutes for cash. Momo is a twelve-year-old Senegalese orphan who snatches her candlesticks at the market and then turns up on her doorstep when his guardian needs him gone. The film is about two people the system has written off and the bargain they strike to belong to someone.
Sophia Loren plays Madame Rosa with a body that no longer cooperates and a will that refuses to quit. She drags herself up the stairs, hides in a basement room she calls her cave, and stares down a past she will not name. Loren lets the fear show through the toughness instead of under it. Ibrahima Gueye plays Momo with a hard shell and quick hands, a boy who deals for a local pusher because nobody offered him anything better. Renato Carpentieri plays Dr. Coen as the one adult who keeps showing up. Babak Karimi plays Hamil, the shopkeeper who hands Momo books and patience, and Abril Zamora plays Lola, a trans neighbor who treats Rosa’s apartment like family.
Edoardo Ponti directs his mother in a script he writes with Ugo Chiti from Romain Gary’s novel. The camera keeps close to faces and finds Bari in warm, worn light, all peeling plaster and sun-bleached streets near the water. Ponti shoots the basement scenes in near darkness so Rosa’s hiding place reads as both shelter and grave. The score leans on Diane Warren and Laura Pausini’s song “Io si (Seen),” which carries the film’s plea to be noticed. The editing moves the relationship along in clean, predictable beats. Every reversal arrives exactly when you expect it.
The script is sentimental and schematic. It builds toward the lesson it announces in the first reel and never surprises you on the way there. What saves it is Loren, who plays the wreckage of a long life without asking for sympathy, and Gueye, who meets her without flinching. Their scenes together carry weight the writing does not earn on its own. The film knows exactly what it is, and it commits to that small, decent ambition without apology.