Even an Oscar Would Weep

By John Skow

MADAME ROSA Directed and Written by Moshe Mizrahi

She slumps up the tenement stairs, leaking sighs, an old, sick, fat woman with an elastic bandage on one leg. Can this really be Simone Signoret, the stunning actress who won a 1959 Oscar for her role as Laurence Harvey's lover in Room at the Topi? Yes. Time is a carrion-eating bird, and this is what appears left of Signoret, 57, unrecognizable except for those cat's eyes. She is cast all too convincingly as a broken-down ex-hooker who squeezes out a living in a seedy quarter of Paris by being a foster grandmother for prostitutes' children. Blink twice, and Brooke Shields will be playing the part.

Madame Rosa won an Oscar last week as the best foreign film of 1977, but the honor seems slightly askew. Director Moshe Mizrahi's film is so unashamedly a vehicle for a grand old actress that the award might better have been made by Motor Trend magazine. Signoret is marvelous as the lovable old baggage. Samy Ben Youb is luminous as Momo, the 14-year-old Arab boy who sticks with Madame Rosa to the end. Claude Dauphin is gallant as the indomitable old doctor who tends Rosa, and who is himself so rickety that he must be carried up to her room when he makes his house calls.

The trouble is that Director Mizrahi, an Israeli whose credits include The House on Chelouche Street, has not found a way to turn this fine acting into a movie. Watching Madame Rosa is like spending an interesting couple of hours at an actors' workshop on an afternoon when everyone is noodling with death scenes. One reason the film lacks conviction is that the script is loaded with melodrama. Rosa is not simply a dear old party, she is made to be a survivor of Auschwitz, an agnos tic Jew who clings to the ceremonies of her religion in a basement shrine. Momo is not just an abandoned child; he is the son (as one of the film's stagier scenes reveals) of a psychotic pimp who murdered the child's prostitute mother. Momo and Rosa not only get a little help from their friends, they are supported by a black transsexual whore who displays the customary heart of gold.

This flabbiness spoils a considerable effort to look clearly at the defeats of old age. A courageous old boarder in Rosa's house simply collapses and dies. Rosa knows that her mind is slipping into senility. The boy Momo, caught in the erratic currents of adolescence, tries to puzzle out these shabby indignities. When the film sees life through his eyes, its strengths begin to cohere. There is no discredit to Signoret in speculating that Madame Rosa would have made better artistic sense if it had been called Momo, and if it had given most of its attention to the life that was beginning, not the one that had all but ended.

-John Skow

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