After a 70-year acting career and winning her first Academy Award in 1962, Sophia Loren is in the Oscar conversation once again for her starring role in The Life Ahead. The film, on Netflix now, is about Madame Rosa (Loren), a Holocaust survivor, who babysits the children of sex workers in her Italian town. And at the heart of the story his her bond with one of the children, Momo (Ibrahima Gueye).
While this movie has all the hallmarks of a true story, it isn’t. The Life Ahead is an adaptation of the 1975 French novel La vie devant soi — or, The Life Before Us — by author Romain Gary. The book is set in France, while the new film is set in Italy, but the plot remains the same. The story has been adapted twice before, including the 1978 Oscar winner for Best International Feature, Madame Rosa. This time, the director is Edoardo Ponti, Loren’s son.
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While there isn’t a real Madame Rosa or a real Momo to point to, there is a real story behind the book that is stranger than fiction. Gary, already a successful writer for many years, published The Life Before Us under the pseudonym Émile Ajar. As reported by the BBC, Gary imagined Ajar as a 34-year-old Algerian man who had to flee France after performing a botched abortion as a medical student. After settling down in Brazil, Ajar became a writer and released his most well-known book in 1975. Keep in mind none of this is real.
To keep up the ruse, Gary had a friend in Brazil help mail manuscripts and had a relative, Paul Pavlowitch, pretend to be Ajar for interviews. For The Life Before Us, “Ajar” won the Prix Goncourt, a top literary prize in France. Gary had previously won the prize in 1956 for the book Les racines du ciel (The Roots of Heaven). No writer is allowed to win the Prix Goncourt more than once, but because of his secret alter ego, Gary remains the only writer to have won twice.
It was only publicly revealed that Gary was Ajar in 1981, the year following his death. As reported by the New York Times, people had just believed that Ajar was a pen name for Pavlowitch, until Pavlowitch revealed Gary was the real Ajar. Pavlowitch told the New York Times that Gary requested that this wasn’t revealed until six months after he died. The BBC reports that Gary also left a note he left to be found after his death in which he asked for the publication of “Vie et mort d’Émile Ajar” — in English, “The Life and Death of Émile Ajar.”
If the drama and mystery of all of this intrigues you, then Gary’s life as a whole probably will, too. In the BBC article, it’s also pointed out that Gary faked aspects of his life in his autobiography.
So, Loren is playing a fictional person written by a fictional author — sort of. Loren actually knew the real Gary. She starred in the adaptation of his book Lady L along with Paul Newman in 1965 and the pair can be seen photographed together here. Now, 55 years later, she’s bringing another one of his characters to life, and people are discovering the story of The Life Before Us — and the story of Émile Ajar once again.
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