Life Is Beautiful

This ilets the first first-run foreign film I’ve ever seen. I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t know if I’ll see another one in the theatre. The movie was very good, but it seems that there are some people who think that, since you can’t understand what they’re saying, you don’t need to hear what they’re saying.

So, anyway, ‘s start with previews.

Dancing At Lugnasa…Lughihasa…Loserasa…skip it. It looks good and it has Catherine McCormick (Murran from Braveheart). Cool.

Central Station looks really good. A little boy and an old woman form a friendship after the boy’s mother is killed right in front of him. Can’t think of anything more uplifting than that.

Little Voice also looks really good. A young woman who never speaks is hit on by Ewan McGregor and becomes a mimic of famous singer’s voices. Looks like the story of my life (except, of course, I’m male and I’ve never been hit on by Ewan McGregor). I’m very quiet and I do Cartman’s voice all the time.

So, on with the flick at hand.

Roberto Benigni (Italy’s answer to Chaplin according to some) is Guido, an Italian Jew at the beginning of WWII. He meets a teacher named Dora (Nicoletta Braschi–Benigni’s real life wife) who literally falls into his arms. They keep meeting accidentally until they finally fall in love. This part of the movie is a very funny romantic comedy. There’s all kinds of slapstick and wordplay (that actually makes it through the translation). The funniest joke involves a riddle, a key and a hat that brings everything to a head. (All puns are thoroughly intended on this page.)

So anyway, Guido and Dora get married and have a little boy. Their life is good. Guido has opened his bookshop and everything is right in the world.

This, of course, is where things go wrong. Guido and his son are sent to a concentration camp one day while Dora is away. She comes home to an empty and wrecked house. When she tells the German officials that there has been a mistake they tell her that there hasn’t and she decides to get on the train with her husband and son.

Throughout the rest of the film Dora is separated from her family and Guido has to make it seem like it is all a game so that his son will not be too upset by the horrors going on around him. Even when his hope is dying he keeps the charade going.

There was a lot of controversy over this film because it is a comedy/drama about the Holocaust. You can’t make anything in the Holocaust funny. Benigni was very careful about it, though. There was nothing that made the atrocities funny. What was funny sometimes was the way he protected his son. Death was very real as was the threat of the German soldiers. And, besides, this is not totally a comedy. It is a movie about surviving with imagination. How do kids survive a high pressure situation? They pretend. The same people didn’t understand Radio Flyer (one of my all time favorite movies). Guido is an overgrown child and he wants his son to grow up without knowing exactly what he went through.

I only had a couple of problems with the movie. First off, where were the Germans’ subtitles? They did a lot of talking, but we never could understand what they were talking about. I guess it wasn’t that important, especially since the Italian characters didn’t know, but it just seemed kind of strange.

Another thing is that they just happened to be thrown into the camps near the end of the war. They must have only been in there for a few months because the kid didn’t grow up.

Those are just nitpicky things. The big problem was the German soldiers. They were way too nice. There were a lot of things that Guido did that would have gotten him killed a real camp. He sends out a message to his wife over the PA system at one point and is caught. I really think that they would have shot him right there. He also had his kid with him who was supposed to be in hiding. (How long can you hide a kid from German soldiers, anyway?)

But, all in all, this is a very good movie. Benigni is a master at weaving humor with a very serious subject like this. It’s a comedy with a lot of heart and more touching moments than anything I’ve seen from Hollywood lately. It’s also not as gruesome as most Holocaust dramas. It’s not out for the realism of Schindler’s List. It wants the heart, not the sympathy. I would definitely suggest this one to anyone who has the patience for subtitles.

My pick for Best Foreign Film of the year. Then again, I don’t think I’ve seen many others from this year except Artemisia, which was also very good.