Madame Rosa

By all accounts Yves Montand advised his wife Simone Signoret not to play Madame Rosa. Happily for us she could not resist such a gift of a role and picked up both a Cesar and a Donatello for her trouble. The film itself won an Oscar which was probably due not just to its excellence but to its 'message' reflecting the sensitive Middle East politics of the time.

This is a beautifully realised piece by Moshe Mizrahi based upon the novel by Romain Cary who sadly took his own life in 1980. The score by Philippe Sarde and Babket Loubna is wonderfully subtle as are the muted tones of Nestor Almendros' cinematography.

As a former prostitute and holocaust survivor who looks after the children of 'working girls' in a sixth floor apartment, Madame Rosa forms a close bond with a young Algerian boy named Momo whose father has murdered his mother. Simone Signoret's rich and understated performance is a distillation of her vast experience in front of the camera and her innate sensitivity. Unusually for an actress she was seemingly without vanity and certainly piled on the pounds for the character. Rosa is tantamount to a guardian angel to Momo and their scenes together are excellent. His other guardian angel is a film editor played by the director's wife Michal Bat-Adam. Mention must also be made of veteran Claude Dauphin as the local doctor. One cannot help wondering what became of Samy Ben-Yubi who plays Momo as this was his first and last film.

Star and director had such a good rapport that they worked together again on 'Chere inconnue'. Coincidentally Montand starred two years later in 'Womanlight' based on another Romain Carey novel.

'Madame Rosa' beat off some stiff competition to win the Oscar, not least 'A Special Day' starring Sophia Loren. Miss Loren just happens to be the latest and very recent incarnation of Rosa in 'A Life ahead of us.' This remake has already attracted dozens of reviews on IMDb whereas the total reviews for the original amount to just seven. As Shakespeare reminds us: "The present eye praises the present object"!

If one sees "Madame Rosa" as a heartwarming portrayal of humanity, then I understand dismissing it as sentimental melodrama and an obvious and simplistic message regarding Arab and Jewish relations from a director, Moshé Mizrahi, from Israel and born in Egypt, of a film about the bond between an old Jewish woman and her adopted Muslim boy. That's how Sophia Loren's director-son saw it for "The Life Ahead," based on the same book by Romain Gary as this film, and that remake is largely removed from the heightened tensions in the Middle East during the 1970s, let alone the Holocaust for which the character of Madame Rosa is a survivor. I have no doubt that this is why the 1977 film was awarded the best Foreign Language Film Oscar, but I don't think it's what makes it a good film. The reasons that do probably reflect Mizrahi's training in French filmmaking.

This 1977 film comes across as entirely less manufactured than the 2020 one--somehow more realistic and unpredictable in its meandering plot. The acting headed by Simone Signoret's César Award winning performance in the title role is surely more effective because of this. Plus, unlike the 2020 movie, it doesn't completely pull all the punches on Jewish and Muslim relations. Madame Rosa says some explicitly bigoted things, as does a Muslim father in one scene who is fooled into thinking his son was raised Jewish. Meanwhile, the picture is unusually diverse, religiously and racially, as well as including a black transgender prostitute as a character. What I appreciate most about "Madame Rosa," as opposed to "The Life Ahead," though, is its reflexivity. It's very much a post-Wave French film in that sense. And, it's what is entirely stripped from the 2020 version, reducing the entire thing to a melodramatic message for diversity--noble, perhaps, but bland.

Here, instead, the entire picture is in the end framed as Momo's recorded narration, and that audio is recorded by a bourgeois couple seeking to adopt him. Moreover, the woman, Nadine, is a film editor, and Momo is transfixed by her ability to reverse time. Essentially, then, Nadine and her husband are the surrogate filmmakers within the film recording the same story of Momo's about his adoptive mother, Madame Rosa, that the film is about. The fictional story of the making of the film is placed within it. Additionally, Momo also tries his hand at performing outside of this subplot, by busking with some routine vaguely reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin or, for the French, Max Linder. This act, in turn, seems to be inspired by a street puppetry performance he observes when he meets Nadine early on. This meta-narrative is more interesting than the dialogue on poverty and prostitution (although the prostitution, too, may be seen as another street performance), race and religion and child-mother relations ending in a call for self-determination and euthanasia that concerns the main story. Sappy or not, "Madame Rosa" is cleverly constructed.

In an apartment building in Paris a physically and mentally ailing Jewish Auschwitz concentration camp survivor and former prostitute called Madame Rosa (Simone Signoret) looks after the children of working prostitutes, including an Algerian Muslim Arab boy called Momo (Samy Ben Youb). This 1977 French feature film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and is based on the award winning novel by Emile Ajar (Romain Gary) 'La vie deviant soi' ('The Life Before Us' / 'The Life In Front of Oneself') as directed and adapted by Israeli film director Moshe Mizrahi (who'd previously directed the not bad 'I Love You Rosa' in Israel). Having (you sense) certain slight autobiographical elements, as well as good performances (especially from Signoret as the worn out Madame and Gabriel Jabbour as the blind Mr. Hamil) and an at times documentary style to it, it's a film which you feel is trying to bridge divisions between people. It's certainly a very theme rich film dealing with issues like prejudice, marginalisation, identity, ethnicity, culture, religion, poverty, survival (in Auschwitz or on the streets), memory, trauma, old age, senility, euthanasia, the toll of time ("I like it when things go backwards" says Momo) and the shaping of personality by experience. But just because a film is thoughtful and poignant it doesn't mean it can't have humour, as for example when Madame Rosa winds Momo's 'father' up by pretending she's brought Momo up Jewish. Madame Rosa is eventually 'saved from life'. "We cannot live without (somebody to) love".

It's a shame that this film doesn't have a wider audience here in the US. Simone Signoret gives perhaps the finest performance of a distinguished career, unafraid to let the ravages of time and hard living show.

The film has some surface similarities to Central Station in that both films are about older women finding new meaning when having to care for a child, street urchins in each film. Both women are embittered and angry at life in general.

Rent Madam Rosa if you can find it. Anyone who loves exceptional film will be happy they gave this one their time.

A must-watch for every French cinema lover. A moving story which is also a commentary of Frances social tapestry in the 70s. Signoret is brilliant but personally I couldn't warm up to any of the children. Especially the main teen was rather unsympathetic, maybe intentionally! As a whole, from execution to the script still highly recommended.