'The Life Ahead' review: Sophia Loren returns to the screen with 'magnificent performance'

Get out your handkerchiefs. Tears are sure to flow while watching "The Life Ahead," set in Italy’s port of Bari.

It’s the story of Madame Rosa, an elderly Italian-Jewish woman and Holocaust survivor who earns her keep by sheltering the children of other prostitutes. New among the kids is Momo (Ibrahima Gueye), a troubled 12-year-old Muslim orphan from Senegal. The bond the two form is hard won, often hilarious and tremendously moving.

This film version of Romain Gary’s 1975 French novel, "The Life Before Us," has much to recommend it. But the big news is the return to the screen, after a decade, of the legendary Sophia Loren. Now 86, the former global sex symbol and Oscar winner for 1961’s "Two Women," again joins the awards race for Best Actress in this Netflix film that plays to her strengths in a role that she wears like a second skin.

It’s a challenging part, one that a lesser performer might play with scene-stealing grandiosity.

Instead, Loren invests Madame Rosa with a nuanced sense of outward strength masking internal fragility. Guided by director and co-writer Edoardo Ponti, Loren’s own son, she plays Madame Rosa as worn out, impatient with her young charges even as she instructs them bluntly in who they are and where they come from. Madame Rosa is also haunted by ghosts that send her sheltering to a locked room in the basement of her home, just like she did as a child when the Gestapo came to hunt her down.

Filmed in 1977 as "Madame Rosa," starring Simone Signoret, "The Life Ahead" takes on fresh contours thanks to the Italian setting, and the brilliant teamwork between Loren and young Gueye -- a remarkable child actor with no experience except a face the camera loves and eyes that speak volumes.

The two meet and lock horns after Momo steals two candlesticks from Madame Rosa, who is later furious when the local doctor begs her to care for the boy. Momo prefers drug trafficking for a dealer, who praises him for his stealth and cunning. As the boy and the old woman butt heads, a grudging admiration develops between the two that could be read as a parable between Jewish-Muslim relations. But director Ponti wisely lets the human connection take precedence over political posturing.

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Loren, who grew up near Naples as WWII bombs fell, certainly knows about the scars left by life during wartime. And her intuitive grasp of the emotional stakes keeps "The Life Ahead" alive with humor and heartbreak.

Indelible memories remain of the impossibly youthful Loren cavorting on screen with Cary Grant in "Houseboat," Marlon Brando in "The Countess from Hong Kong" and her adored paisan Marcello Mastroianni in "Marriage Italian Style." Even as the ravages of time take their toll on Madame Rosa, Loren’s eternal beauty shines through.

You could argue that "The Life Ahead" tips over into sentiment when Madame Rosa argues that "it’s precisely when you give up hope that good things happen." But there is not a single false note in the bare bones purity of Loren’s magnificent performance. Just sit back and behold.