La vita davanti a sé (2020)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Madame Rosa	Sophia Loren	½
Momo	Ibrahima Gueye	½
Lola	Abril Zamora	½
Dr. Cohen	Renato Carpentieri	½
Hamil	Babak Karimi	½
Drug dealer	Massimilliano Rossi	½

Review

The benevolence is agonizingly obvious in this overly neat Italian drama film about an old Holocaust survivor and former prostitute (Sophia Loren) who takes in a 12-year old wayward Senegalese immigrant (Ibrahima Gueye) to live with her for a couple of months. The film is written and directed by Loren's son Edoardo Ponti (Between Strangers) and is a remake of the 1977 French film Madame Rosa, only this time the story is moved from Paris to Rome and from the 1970s to 2020. The result is basically that everything which was daring and edgy about the original story here becomes meticulous. Ponti is so afraid to step on any toes that he hardly makes a footprint at all, and so the film turns into a pastiche of good intentions where the drama unfolds like in an idealized little movie world. The friendship between Loren and the very talented Gueye could otherwise have been heartfelt. It has a lot more potential than what Ponti is able to extract here. In several of the film's otherwise unremarkable scenes, it is Gueye who keeps the film alive with his sincerity.