In 1977, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film went to a touchingly sentimental French film called Madame Rosa (La Vie Devant Soi) directed by Moshé Mizrahi, a Moroccan-born Israeli. The highlight of the film is the fine performance by Simone Signoret, which won her a Cesar award.

The Story: The story centers on the aging title character, a Jewish woman in her mid-sixties in poor health with a rich though traumatic set of memories to look back upon in the twilight of her life. During the Holocaust, Madame Rosa (Simone Signoret) had been betrayed by a former lover to the French police, trucked with a suitcase of her belongings to a stadium, and then loaded on a train with so many other Jews for that unthinkable trip to Auschwitz. Surviving Auschwitz, she became a prostitute after returning to France, selling herself right up until age fifty, when she gave up the trade for “aesthetic reasons.” She then began providing daycare services for the children of the other street walkers. As the film opens, her business is brisk. We observe her dealing sensitively with about eight children in her sixth floor apartment. As the film continues, her business dwindles severely as she progressively loses both her mobility and her memory/cognition and the prostitutes begin to opt to send their children elsewhere.

One child with whom she has a special relationship is an Arab boy named Mohammed (nicknamed Momo) (Samy Ben Youb) who had been left with her when he was just three years old, abandoned by his parents. Initially, they had sent money orders to cover the cost of his care, but later those payments ceased. The parents have never come to visit Momo and for much of the film neither he nor we know anything about them. Momo is now a 14-year-old, although Rosa, for selfish reasons, has misled him into believing he is just eleven. In the early scenes, we see Momo acting his feelings of abandonment quite a bit (he sells his beloved dog and then tosses the money into a sewer), but gradually he comes to appreciate Rosa more and more and the two develop a very special bond. Rosa is very respectful that Mohammed’s religious heritage is different than her own (she could easily have brought him up as a Jew considering that he was just three when he fell into her care), and has enlisted the help of an elderly Muslim, Mr. Hamil (Gabriel Jabbour), for Momo’s cultural education. Mr. Hamil, however, is teetering on dementia and carries a volume of Moby Dick which he mistakes for the Koran. Rosa is caring and protective and Momo becomes equally devoted to her as her condition deteriorates.

Momo’s father does ultimately show up at the door, but it quickly becomes no cause for celebration. He has just been released from an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital (he proudly proclaims that he was officially declared insane). He had been placed there after killing his wife out of jealousy (she was turning tricks at a rate in excess of fifteen a day). The father has come to claim his son but is obviously unfit and unstable. Madame Rosa deftly crafts a remedy. Other than Momo, the only other child remaining in her care is a Jewish boy name Moise (Elio Bencoil). She presents him as the man’s son while confessing contritely that she has apparently mistakenly brought him up as a Jew instead of a Muslim. He has been circumcised and bar mitzvahed and the whole shebang! When the man accuses Madame Rosa of having his son baptized, she ensures him that she would not have done any such thing! Nevertheless, the man is so overcome with shock at the idea of his son having been made into a Jew, that he dies on the spot. Momo, who has witnessed the entire proceedings, is unmoved by it all except that he has serendipitously discovered that his true age is fourteen rather than eleven.

Madame Rosa still lives in fear of being carted off once again to a concentration camp. She carefully maintains a set of false papers by which she believes she can prove, should the need arise, that she is not and has never been of Jewish descent. Then, in the basement, she maintains a secret room with her Jewish paraphernalia which she calls her Israeli room. She goes there occasionally to privately revel in her Jewish identity. Madame Rosa is also thoroughly dismayed at the prospect of being carted off to a hospital (her health is deteriorating rapidly) and being kept alive by tortuous medical procedures (which she equates to tortures of the concentration camps). She wants to die in peace in her home at the time that nature dictates. Her physician, Dr. Katz (Claude Dauphin), is bound by legal requirements and ethical expectations of his profession and must arrange for her to be hospitalized when her condition reaches a critical state. It is now Momo’s turn to craft a creative remedy. Momo begs Dr. Katz for an additional two or three days in which to resolve arrangements for both Madame Rosa and himself (he would likely be turned over to some kind of social services upon her hospitalization). When Dr. Katz returns, Momo informs him that Madame Rosa’s relatives in Israel are coming that day to pick her up and take her with them back to Israel. They are very wealthy, Momo claims, and all has been arranged. Momo, with the help of Madame Rosa’s most loyal friends, gets her to her secret Israeli room where she can expire in tranquility. Momo remains loyally at her side until she passes away and, somewhat morbidly, for several days thereafter, until the odor of her decaying body draws attention to the secret hideaway.

Themes: There is an obvious metaphor is this film for the international problems that plague the middle east and the never ending conflict between the Jews and the Arabs. In Madame Rosa, we see the somewhat optimistic suggestion that it really need not be so – that by the agencies of mutual respect for each other’s culture and the basic caring that ought to derive from the commonality of humanity, the on-going hatred and killing need not exist. While the film reflects an ideal to which all people of good will could aspire, anyone who has studied the causes of the strife in the middle east understands that it is an extraordinarily complex problem, that the accumulated grievances on both sides are extremely deep, and that the inherent conflict in political objectives is intractable. Two strong-willed and antithetical cultures cannot successfully permeate the same parcel of land. As a film, however, Madame Rose succeeds to a significant extent because the naïvely idealistic message is handled with utmost restraint. I am curious, however, about how this film is experienced by Jews and how it is experienced by Arabs, especially Palestinians – whether either of these groups find the film offensive. I wonder, for example, whether Arabs are offended by the story presenting an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor as “caretaker” for an Arab boy abandoned by his parents. Do Arabs experience that plot device as condescending? I just don’t know.

There are a couple of lesser themes as well. The film poses questions about the issue of euthanasia and the right of self-determination as it relates to when we exit from this life. Although the argument is left in very general terms, the film seems to come down on the side of the dignity of choosing one’s own way and time of dying. Then, secondly, Madame Rosa, hints at the same kind of theme made more explicit in a film like All About My Mother (1999), where we encounter a rich assortment of life’s misfits and deviants and discover that they too are capable of and deserving of love. While the characters in Madame Rosa are not so flamboyantly irregular, we nevertheless are presented with hookers, a transvestite, abandoned children, street performers, Arabs and Jews intermixed by the common circumstance of ghetto poverty, and several characters in various stages of the decrepitude of aging. Yet, their fundamental humanity shines through.

Production Values: This is a lovely bittersweet portrayal of life and a unique and special relationship between a woman and a boy that challenges the terms in which our international human affairs transpire. I certainly recommend the film, if for no other reason than the very fine performance by Simone Signoret. Signoret was at the twilight of her career for this film, having previous credits in such pictures as La Ronde (1950), Room at the Top (1959), The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), and The Confession (1970). Her performance here is arguably the best of her career.

Madame Rosa is significantly reminiscent of the great Brazilian film, Central Station (1998), which I list among the top-ten foreign language all-time (Non-English Language Films that pack a wallop). Both films relate to an embittered older woman who develops a special relationship with an abandoned, practically orphaned street boy. Both films offer highly praised performances by the female leads as well as good performances by the boys. Beyond that however, Madame Rosa suffers in the comparison with Central Station and the comparison reveals crisply why Madame Rosa is not a five-star film, despite having been based on a very good novel (by Romain Gary) and despite winning an Academy Award. Both of the main characters in Central Station undergo significant character development over the course of the film. In fact, the greatest quality of the film is the skill with which Fernanda Montenegro makes her character’s remarkable development as a person credible by its nuanced gradation. Simone Signoret is probably no less capable as an actress, but her script provided her with no such opportunity. The Madame Rosa that we encounter at the opening of the film is essentially the same person that leaves us near the end, except for some increase in the physical ravaging of age. Likewise, the only development that occurs in Momo takes place within the first segment of the film, as he progresses from his acting-out phase to the more caring boy.

And talking about progression, I found the entire timeframe of Madame Rosa somewhat less than credible. It all seems to transpire within less than a year, since Momo is almost fourteen as the film begins (nominally eleven, but really fourteen as he ultimately learns) and is still fourteen as it ends. The stages of Madame Rosa’s physical and medical status are presented credibly except that the rate of progression through those stages occurs excessively rapidly. Chronic cognitive impairments develop insidiously over several years rather than over several months. The secondary consequences of hypertension also typically develop quite gradually. Mizrahi never establishes firm control over the pacing of his narrative. Nevertheless, I don’t mean to dismiss the capacity of this film to warm the heart with its sensitively-presented and finely-acted humanity.

Bottom-Line: Madame Rosa is a very good film with a narrative that implies hope that people, at times, care about one another regardless of ethnic or religious barriers. There is an award-winning performance by Simone Signoret, a heart-warming story, and an interesting array of secondary characters. Madame Rosa is in French with English subtitles and has a running time of 105 minutes. It is rated PG.


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from France:

Alphaville
Amélie
The Battle of Algiers
La Belle et la Bête
Bob le Flambeur
Le Boucher
Boudu Saved from Drowning
A Bout de Souffle
La Cage aux Folles
Céline and Julie Go Boating
La Cérémonie
La Chèvre
Children of Paradise
Cléo from 5 to 7
Un Coeur en Hiver
Contempt
Cyrano de Bergerac
Delicatessen
The Dinner Game
Diva
The Earrings of Madame de . . .
Entre Nous
Eyes Without a Face
La Femme Nikita
Forbidden Games
French Cancan
Grand Illusion
Harvest
Hate
The Horseman on the Roof
Jean de Florette/Manon
The King of Hearts
Last Year at Marienbad
Life and Nothing But
A Man Escaped
Le Million
Monsieur Hire
The Mother and the Whore
La Nuit de Varennes
Pépé le Moko
Peppermint Soda
Playtime
Providence
Rififi
La Ronde
Round Midnight
The Rules of the Game
Le Samourai
Summer
A Sunday in the Country
The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe
Three Colors
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Vagabond
Wages of Fear

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older