Beauty Amid Horror
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
Italian auteur Roberto Benigni finds
a new way to examine the Holocaust.
With Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi
Written and directed by Roberto Benigni
THE COMMERCIAL CINEMA PROBABLY doesn't have many extraordinary moments left in it after 100 years. But Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful is one of them.
Benigni, the exuberant Italian actor/director who does slapstick and farce so well, has imagined a tragic comedy that plays without a trace of sentiment or melodrama. Instead, it's perfectly bittersweet and ironic, with several moments so small and fine that they might actually leave you holding your breath in grateful amazement.
In his earlier movies, like Johnny Stecchino and The Monster, Benigni displayed a comic talent some have compared with Chaplin's. In Life Is Beautiful, he still serves up ample smiles and laughter. But this movie walks the tightrope between comedy and tragedy with an acrobat's skill, and Benigni wears the dual masks as comfortably as most people wear their arms and legs.
The actor/director plays Guido, an affable Jewish waiter at a posh restaurant in 1939 Italy. He enjoys life and all its merriment, and he sets his romantic eye on Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), a pretty schoolteacher in town. They meet one afternoon when she falls from the loft of a barn and lands on top of Guido in some hay. She's been stung by a bee, so Guido naturally sucks the poison from the sting--which happens to be on the shank of her lovely gam.
A few more comical meetings ensue until Guido finally sweeps her away. But already the ill winds of war have begun to blow: Their escape from her engagement party takes place on the back of a horse that's been painted green in an anti-Semitic pogrom. As the Italian aristocracy falls into line behind their Nazi interlopers, little people like Guido, Dora and their adorable child Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini) go about their business with love and high spirits.
Then the soldiers move in. Guido and Joshua are put aboard a train and taken to a concentration camp. It's all very strange for the little boy until his father tells him the truth: It's only a game, a wonderful adventurous game, and if he'll play along and follow his father's lead, he'll win a real tank to go with the toy tank he cherishes.
And so the game begins. When the Nazis take the children and the elderly to the execution showers, Joshua manages to hide. That makes protecting him even harder for Guido. It also means he has to make up new rules to keep Joshua focused on their perilous game of survival.
The beauty and resonance of Benigni's achievement comes from more than just his cogent subject matter. Though his voice as an actor is loud and quick in Life Is Beautiful, his hand as a writer/director is masterfully subtle and patient.
On his first night out with Dora, Guido spins a romantic gesture into an imaginary moment from their past. It's a fleeting scene in the film, but it says something unusually profound--even postmodern--about history, memory and experience. (Can a clown like Benigni really be that complex?) When Joshua asks why a shop in town permits "No Jews or Dogs," Guido explains that every store has its own restrictions, like the one down the street that permits "No Chinese or Kangaroos." Some time later, as Guido walks around the fog-soaked camp, he comes upon a mountain of exterminated bodies. It appears before him like a dream, or a landscape in a surrealist painting.
Benigni only allows us to witness this image briefly. For Life Is Beautiful takes place almost entirely in the self-contained world of its blessed central character. You don't see many scenes of fascist terror or bloody war in Benigni's delicate character study, which challenges you to call upon your own awareness of history.
Before his captivity, one of Guido's friends in Rome is a German doctor who dines at his restaurant and exchanges riddles with him. "What disappears the moment you speak its name?" the doctor asks. The answer is easy for a whimsical riddler like Guido: "Silence." But for Guido and others like him, you might say silence equals death. Later, in the camp, Guido encounters the doctor, who's delighted to see his amusing friend. Their ultimate conversation is a moment of human behavior you can't possibly imagine--a shocking, crystallizing moment in Benigni's unspeakably good, horribly sad comedy.