La Vie devant soi (1977) - film review

Madame Rosa, a former prostitute, lives in a top floor apartment in a mixed race district of Paris.  Although her health is failing, she manages to look after the abandoned children of prostitutes, including a rebellious young Arab boy named Momo.  An Auschwitz survivor, Madame Rosa imagines that the Nazis are still around and instructs Momo to protect her from them.  Momo faithfully repays his guardian’s kindness by raising money to support her in her dying days, but he is curious to find out about his own origins...

In the 1970s, racial intolerance in France, indeed most of the western world, was on the increase, fuelled by the escalating violence in the Middle East and a growing public concern over immigration.  In this troubled decade, La Vie devant soi offered a rare beacon of hope, a film that stressed the importance of racial identity whilst presenting the absurdity and inhumanity of racial prejudice with great eloquence.  The film was directed by the distinguished Israeli filmmaker Moshé Mizrahi, adapted from a prize-winning novel by Romain Gary.  The latter created a storm of controversy when, on his death in 1980, it was revealed that he had written the novel under an assumed name (Émile Ajar), allowing him to win the prestigious literary award the Prix Goncourt a second time (something that was strictly forbidden).  Gary’s well-developed penchant for irony, compassion and social justice resonate throughout the film, which is arguably the best adaptation of his work.

What makes the film particularly memorable is the heart-warming rapport between its two lead actors, Simone Signoret and Samy Ben-Youb.   The role of the former Jewish prostitute and Holocaust survivor slowly succumbing to decrepitude and dependency on others could have been written for Signoret, and her performance is easily one of her finest, a worthy recipient of the Best Actress César in 1978.  Ben-Youb is just as engaging in his one and only screen role - his portrayal of the abandoned, totally mixed-up Algerian boy Momo immediately brings to mind Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959).  Despite his evident lack of acting experience, Ben-Youb has no difficulty stealing our sympathies and the film is as much his as it is Signoret’s.  The final sequences of the film, in which Momo’s love for his guardian compels him to take charge of her destiny in a dramatic way, are as poignant as they are shocking and we are left wondering what it means to truly love someone and how far that love may take us.

The film not only shines a light on racial intolerance in the present day (the most memorable scene is the one in which Momo’s father, a Muslim, has a cardiac arrest when he learns that his son has been brought up as a Jew), it also evokes painful memories of the Holocaust and France’s shameful complicity in the round up of Jews.   Another taboo subject the film broaches, with surprising candour and daring, is that of euthanasia; four decades on, assisted suicide is one of the most hotly debated issues of our time, and the notion that everyone has the right to a dignified death is one that is powerfully expressed in the film.  The parallel between the torture inflicted on Jews by the Nazis in concentration camps and the suffering experienced by those being kept alive by artificial means in hospitals is crude to the point of being obscene but it does prompt the spectator to question the value of prolonging life for the sake of it.

La Vie devant soi touches on so many pertinent social themes and has so much to say to the present generation that it is surprising how little known the film is today.  When it was released in 1977, it attracted an audience of two million in France and enjoyed a successful international showing.  As well as being nominated for three Césars, it won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1978.  It is a film that tackles a whole raft of controversial subjects with sensitivity and intelligence, and it is probably even more relevant today than when it was first seen.   Mizrahi made a few notable films after this one, including Chère inconnue (1980) with Signoret, but none of these has that potent blend of compassion, insight and humanity that so powerfully illuminates La Vie devant soi and which makes it truly a film for our time.

© James Travers 2012

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