Word: rosa
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...physically beautiful, emotionally sensitive boy who has an insatiable need for love, yet suppresses and tries to hide his desire. Madame Rosa does not hide her sensuality as well; she demands special behavior from Momo, and the more he complies the more obvious her special attention to Momo at the expense of the other children becomes. As he grows older not only does he become more convinced that what his Moslem mentor Monsieur Hasil says is true--to live you have to love something or someone--and he begins to focus that love on Madame Rosa...
Time is not in his favor. As he grows and learns to love and depend on Madame Rosa, she grows older too. And her age does more than increase her love, it also saps her strength and undermines her health. Her weakness makes her still more dependent on Momo, which further heightens his love for her. At the same time it forces him to realize that someday soon she will die and there will be no one left who needs him or whom he will want to need, in turn...
...park, tells him he is the most beautiful child in Paris and asks him to talk to her. He does until she says something disturbing at which point he leaves--only to return to her months later when his father, newly released from a psychiatric hospital, dies on Madame Rosa's floor...
MOMO'S FATHER killed his mother out of jealousy; he was deemed insane and locked away. On his release he seeks his son. Madame Rosa, trying to protect Momo both for his sake and, selfishly, for hers, tricks the man into believing she had mistakenly raised his son as an Orthodox Jew upon which he violently protests, convulses and dies...
...death is the turning point in the movie. Not only does Momo realize Madame Rosa knew who his parents were all along but he has to witness the ugly scene of his father's death. He hardens--perhaps because Madame Rosa's credibility has been shaken, perhaps because he discovers his father was less than a nobody. At any rate, he reaches into the dead man's pocket, out of Madame Rosa's sight, finds a cigarette and begins to smoke. He smokes again at Madame Nadine's when he is talking into her friend's tape-recorder reciting...