Post by Dracula on Dec 12, 2020 19:03:13 GMT -5
The Life Ahead(11/30/2020)
Some actors and actresses of advanced age keep on working until the end, some (like the recently departed Sean Connery) do reach the point where they hard-retire, and some kind of go in and out of retirement in such a way that they sort of surprise you when they make a comeback. That appears to be what happened with The Life Ahead, the first feature film performance by the legendary Italian actress Sofia Loren since 2009. The performance has received Oscar buzz on that name recognition alone but people have not been talking as much about the actual movie and once I saw the film’s basic premise I kind of groaned a little. Set in Bari Italy, the film looks at a twelve year old black immigrant street kid who gets taken in by Loren’s character, an aged holocaust survivor and former prostitute who has taken to periodically fostering troubled youths and the two end up teaching each other lessons about life. There are some pretty strong red flags there, we’ve seen a lot of these “young black person’s life is changed by the privilege of being around an old white person” movies (Call it the “Finding Forrester” effect) and the Europeans are not immune to this paternalistic bullshit either. This movie does do a couple things right that some of the other ones don’t; for one thing the white woman here does reach out to another Muslim man to help raising the kid, so there is some acknowledgement that the mere proximity to whiteness isn’t what’s beneficial to minorities. There’s also a transwoman here helping so there’s a bit of an “it takes a village” feel to the whole thing with various outsiders working together. Really the problems here are less related to representational politics and more just to do with the fact that the story just kind of feels a bit cliché and it never really finds overly unique depths for its characters and while Loren is good here I’m not sure this performance would really stand out too much if it wasn’t coming from a 60s icon.
**1/2 out of Five
Some actors and actresses of advanced age keep on working until the end, some (like the recently departed Sean Connery) do reach the point where they hard-retire, and some kind of go in and out of retirement in such a way that they sort of surprise you when they make a comeback. That appears to be what happened with The Life Ahead, the first feature film performance by the legendary Italian actress Sofia Loren since 2009. The performance has received Oscar buzz on that name recognition alone but people have not been talking as much about the actual movie and once I saw the film’s basic premise I kind of groaned a little. Set in Bari Italy, the film looks at a twelve year old black immigrant street kid who gets taken in by Loren’s character, an aged holocaust survivor and former prostitute who has taken to periodically fostering troubled youths and the two end up teaching each other lessons about life. There are some pretty strong red flags there, we’ve seen a lot of these “young black person’s life is changed by the privilege of being around an old white person” movies (Call it the “Finding Forrester” effect) and the Europeans are not immune to this paternalistic bullshit either. This movie does do a couple things right that some of the other ones don’t; for one thing the white woman here does reach out to another Muslim man to help raising the kid, so there is some acknowledgement that the mere proximity to whiteness isn’t what’s beneficial to minorities. There’s also a transwoman here helping so there’s a bit of an “it takes a village” feel to the whole thing with various outsiders working together. Really the problems here are less related to representational politics and more just to do with the fact that the story just kind of feels a bit cliché and it never really finds overly unique depths for its characters and while Loren is good here I’m not sure this performance would really stand out too much if it wasn’t coming from a 60s icon.
**1/2 out of Five
