Madame Rosa

Madame Rosa French La Vie devant soi is a 1977 French film adaptation of the novel The Life Before Us 1975 French La vie devant soi, authored by Romain Gary under the pseudonym of mile Ajar. Through his double identity, Gary, who had already received the Prix Goncourt in 1956 for Les Racines du ciel, received it again, in 1975 for La vie devant soi, becoming the first writer to be twice attributed the highly coveted award. The film adaptation was directed by Mosh Mizrahi and produced by Daniel Pomerantz.

The story of Madame Rosa and Momo unfolds in a multiethnic, multireligious and multicultural community. The profound emotional bond between the two main characters, one an old Jewish woman and the other a young Arab boy, is what drives the film emotionally from the beginning to the end. The film also emphasizes the compassion and empathy that can be found in such a disadvantaged community context through the helping gestures of the secondary characters. Madame Lola, for example, while being bluntly described by Momo as a transvestite who had been a boxing champion in Senegal, is depicted in both the book and the film without any sensationalism. To the contrary, she is presented as a compassionate human being who is concerned by the poverty of Madame Rosa and Momo, giving them food and money without expecting anything in return. Momo says of her that shes really somebody, that he likes her Madame Rosa declares, Shes a Saint, I dont know where wed be without her. The dynamic represented between Madame Rosa, Momo and their transsexual prostitute neighbor, Madame Lola, stands as a good example of the type of deeply humanistic values and respect for human difference, whether that difference is of a sexual, religious, or racial nature, that is embedded in Romain Garys written text and further successfully emphasized through Mosh Mizrahis cinematographic representation of the story.Ralph Manheims Englishlanguage translation of La Vie devant soi has been published twice by Doubleday, under different titles ........

Source: Wikipedia