Word: mizrahi
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...persecuted minorities, alone, haunted by their pasts and trapped as much by wanting to stay in their surroundings as by their material inability to escape. It is irrelevant, as far as their relationship goes, that, for instance, one is Jewish and the other Arab. Because it is, director Moshe Mizrahi makes the point that appearances really are no more than superficial. It is only the substance that counts and the substance, that is, the mutual giving and needing, that flows between Momo and Madame Rosa...
MADAME ROSA Directed and Written by Moshe Mizrahi...
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...
...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...
...David T. Mizrahi...