Word: momo
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Madame Rosa's death is what half the plot of Madame Rosa, this year's Oscar winner as Best Foreign Film, is about. The other half is about a boy, Momo's, maturation. But there is more to the movie than just the relationship between a dying woman and the growing boy she raises, just as there is more to their relationship than just a difference...
Madame Rosa is a former whore; Momo is the son of a different whore. Mme. Rosa is a Jew; she raises Momo as a Moslem. She was the only member of her family to survive Auschwitz; he was abandoned by his parents at age three. She is haunted by past persecution; he is tortured because he can't be sure of his ancestry...
...Momo is not the only child Madame Rosa has charge of--she makes her living, since she gave up prostitution and wetnursing, taking care of prostitutes' children. Most of the mothers visit their offspring, but a few of the young no longer have parents willing to support them, let alone visit. Momo is one of those...
...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...
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...