The Life Ahead
netflixEdoardo Ponti's newest feature, The Life Ahead, attempts to show the power of human connection. Both going through their own struggles of life, a 12-year old thief and drug dealer named Momo (Ibrahima Gueye) reluctantly becomes friends with the elderly Madame Rosa (Sophia Loren), who takes Momo in after he attempts to rob her. The film might have good intentions but, ultimately, is a disappointingly messy outing that fails to build a captivating or even interesting narrative.
If there is one positive within the film, it would be the performances. In what should be no surprise for anyone who has followed her legendary career, Sophia Loren is nearly stunning here, with her performance easily being the highlight of the entire film. Her emotional and deteriorating character who has to be both powerful yet vulnerable is the one area of the film that feels truly engaging and really starts to find some depth. It is also worth giving praise to Ibrahima Gueye, who is making his feature acting debut with the project. Though the screenplay ultimately fails his ability, Gueye proves himself as a capable young actor not only being able to show an impressive amount of emotion on his own but also having a solid amount of chemistry with Loren. Abril Zamora is also quite solid, finishing out the main trio of strong performances, all of which have solid chemistry and play off of each other's differences with an elegance and craft.
Sadly, the same sentiment cannot be said for the screenplay, which easily is the worst part of the feature. Whilst each character is given a unique story and perspective that stands alone as intriguing enough, the film struggles and ultimately fails to bring these worlds together into a competent single feature. There is no craft to the film as it smashes together these characters – all of which exist in completely separate worlds. In one sense, showing how each character can exist in seemingly completely unique worlds despite all living in the same general space is a unique idea, but then the film either needs to keep the perspectives separate or bring them together in a sense that is smartly crafted. Instead of this, The Life Ahead unnaturally tries to bring all of its stories together in a way that not only feels forced but also incredibly uninteresting. The Life Ahead is, overall, an extremely boring film that has no interesting hook or thesis to engage the audience. It is filled with random characters that, from a screenplay perspective, have no purpose being together just existing in an unmotivated sense. Even if the performances themselves work, the film gives these actors no material worthy of their time.
The Life Ahead seemingly has all the pieces to be a unique and worthwhile feature but, at the end of its 94-minute runtime, feels not only empty but a disservice to the performances that it carries. The film loses most of its intriguing ideas very early on, putting uninteresting characters in an uninteresting world without giving them anything of substance or intrigue to do. For the film to work, it needed to go back to the drawing board and drastically rethink its core identity and what it was aiming to do, then recraft itself to actually serve that purpose instead of failing to achieve anything as an overall feature.
