Sophia Loren returns at 86 to say that retirement is still a long way off | Cinema

Sophia Loren, 86, who fills the screen in the role of Madame Rosa, a former prostitute, an Italian Holocaust survivor who welcomes a young orphaned migrant into her home. A life ahead, premiered this Friday on Netflix, marks the return of the great Italian actress, a bisexual presence on the screen in recent decades. Not for lack of desire to work or for proposals. “Many scripts are still sent to me, but no one has challenged me how A life ahead. That’s why I haven’t worked for almost ten years, “he said in an interview with New York Times. Not just that. It’s a family matter: the film is shot by Loren’s youngest son, Edoardo Ponti.

Since the 1980s, Sophia Loren has decided to reverse priorities. She had spent the previous 30 years building a career which, first in Italy, then in Hollywood, had made her one of the most celebrated and respected actresses in the world. He then left an intense life, a very busy program, during which he was directed by Vittorio de Sica, Ettore Scola, Dino Risi or Charlie Chaplin, alongside Marcelo Mastroianni, Cary Grant, Paul Newman or Peter Sellers. It was at that moment, she recalls in the same interview, published this Friday, that she asked herself: “‘What do you want from life, Sophia?'” “A family” was the answer she found. Married since the 1950s to producer Carlo Ponti (who died in 2007), mother of two, she already had a family, but she lacked time. “From now on, maybe it will slow down a little,” he thought then.

Why stop?

In 1980 Edoardo Ponti was seven years old. Today, at 47, he is the director Sophia Loren has worked with the most over the past two decades. Before A life ahead, had directed it in the short A human voice, adaptation of the work of Jean Cocteau (2014), and in Between strangers (2002, also with Mira Sorvino and Gerard Depardieu). Even so, this mother-child, actress-director relationship is not simply supported by the filial relationship. On the part of Sophia Loren, currently living in Geneva, there is also, in a sense, a return movement. “Look, I started with Vittorio De Sica and many others before going to America, and I felt the need to work again with an Italian director”, he recently explained to The Republic. “Edoardo is Italian, isn’t he? I immediately understand your way of speaking. “It’s weird … This director really looks like my son.”

Adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel of the same name, published in 1975 under the pseudonym of Émile Ajar, and subject to film adaptation two years later (Madame Pink, directed by Moshé Mizrahi, awarded with the Oscar for best foreign film and which earned Simone Signoret the César for best actress), A life ahead, with the argument of Ugo Chiti (Gomorrah), recontextualizes itself to the current European reality. From Paris we went to the coastal city of Bari, Europe’s gateway to refugees from Africa and the Middle East, and the young man welcomed by Madame Rosa is now not Algerian, but Senegalese (Momo, played by Ibrahima Gueye).

Sophia Loren does not contemplate the reform: “if I like being an actress, why stop?” -, but at this advanced stage of his career he prefers to devote himself only to what truly satisfies him. “I wanted to find a role that would inspire and challenge me. Madame Rosa was that character, not only for her different emotions, sometimes contradictory, but also for the message of tolerance, love and inclusion that the film conveys “, New York Times. The film also provided, and in a different way, the return movement we talked about earlier. “I was a child during the [Segunda] War [Mundial] and this film reminds me of the things I experienced in Naples in those years ”, recalled the The Republic. “I feel it very close to my heart. And we have to make sure that certain things don’t happen again ”.

She defines herself as a perfectionist and cherishes the memories of her American career and the chance it gave her to work with Cary Grant or Frank Sinatra, but reserves more space for her work with De Sica (in particular Two women(1960, in which she plays a mother who fights to protect her daughter in the final throes of World War II and for which she won the Oscar for best actress), for her role A memorable day (1977), by Ettore Scola, and for the long relationship on the screen with Marcelo Mastroianni, with whom he acted twelve times, including in A memorable day. It was also the memories of that film that led her to a particular moment in the filming of A life ahead.

One of the scenes of the 1977 film is set on the terrace of the building where the housewife lives, devoid of life and affection, played by Loren and the discreet neighbor played by Mastroianni, a homosexual persecuted by the fascist regime of Mussolini (in 1938, the day in which Hitler met the Duce in Rome). Edoardo Ponti has built a bridge with this past in the new film, shooting one of his decisive scenes on the terrace of Madame Rosa’s house. “It was the first time I had shot a scene on a terrace in a long time and the avalanche of memories and emotions was overwhelming,” Sophia Loren recalls. Variety.

The great actress may confess that she is unaware of contemporary cinema – “but it’s a pleasure to see the work of Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino, and what’s more they are Neapolitans!” – but it is certain that he has not abandoned the cinema. This was also confirmed the day he shot on that terrace in Bari. “Although more than 40 years have passed between the two scenes, my passion for storytelling and films has remained intact.” At the age of 86 she felt “butterflies in her stomach” and it consoled her to know that, beside her, “I was, in the figure of my son, a director whom I loved and trusted deeply”.

That day, she says, she felt “truly blessed”. Many years later, Sophia Loren is back. At 86 she never stopped being an actress. It is not yet time for reform.

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