Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Madame Rosa (1977)

Director: Moshe Mizrahi

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Badly adapted from a rather good novel by Emile Ajar, this is art cinema at its artless, exploitative worst. An essentially simple tale - of a prostitute's child, Momo, brought up with a bevy of similar kids by professional foster-mother/aged ex-prostitute Madame Rosa - is used to screw the audience for every ounce of its social conscience, with Signoret evidently (and mistakenly) convinced that she's in a 'political' film. Far from reflecting the realities of streetwalking in Pigalle, or of childhood in the ghetto of Belleville, the film trades instead on Rosa's memories of Auschwitz (to which she refers with objectionable facility) and the boy's Algerian background to fabricate a pretentious allegory on Israeli/Arab conflict. Eventually, thank God, Rosa dies and doe-eyed Momo is 'rescued' - in a crowning example of nauseating, complacent sentimentality - by a chic young couple.

Author: CA 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Moshe Mizrahi

Producer: Raymond Danon, Roland Girard, Jean Bolvary

Cast: Simone Signoret, Claude Dauphin, Samy Ben Youb, Gabriel Jabbour, Michal Bat Adam, Costa-Gavras full cast

Duration: 120 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.