Benigni's 'Beautiful' take on a tragic time

COURTESY MIRIMAX Benigni finds spaces of love in a landscape of hate.

Guido is one of those enviable guys who, through an uncanny combination of luck and skill, makes everything go his way--think Ferris Bueller. There's no suspense as to whether he will succeed; the question is rather how he will succeed. Played by director Roberto Benigni, he's a magical delight from start to finish. Guido's ambitions are modest--working as a waiter, his typical mission is to manipulate his last customer into ordering the only dish that's already prepared. His solutions, however, are much more creative than you'd expect, and Guido is even more lovable than Ferris ever was.

The catch is that it's 1939, and Guido is a Jew in Fascist Italy. Under these conditions, where survival is not guaranteed even for the fittest, suspense is inevitable. In the first half of the movie, Guido applies his talent to wooing his future wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi). These quaint scenes paint courtship as an imaginative cross between a game and an art, and they seem--especially in retrospect--charmingly idyllic. Then, five years later, when the couple and their young son, Joshua, are transplanted to a concentration camp, the change is--needless to say--rather disorienting.

Suspense abounds here for two reasons. One is that the film's beginning seems to promise a happy ending, in spite of the film's historical reality. The other is that the audience can't resist falling in love with the characters, and a tragic ending would be heartbreaking. You don't even bother to try to predict the outcome of this movie; you just watch with your fingers crossed.

The Holocaust has provided endless fodder for film, with Italian filmmakers clearly haunted by this period of their history, compelled to tell the story in film again and again. The challenge at this point is to approach the difficult subject from a fresh angle. We know the story, but we do not know this story, the one Benigni tells us, which is not about a country but about a family. This story does not horrify us with atrocity but moves us with love.

Benigni undertakes the apparent paradox of a slapstick comedy set in a concentration camp, and he succeeds. In a less innovative movie, the mood would swerve dramatically with the change in setting, making a clean shift from comedy to tragedy. Instead, in Life is Beautiful, comedy adapts to tragic circumstances. The integration is not an easy, seamless one; the paradox is acknowledged but not resolved. It's hard on the facial muscles, which are constantly alternating between a concerned frown and an amused smile.

The problem of fate runs throughout the film, manifest in a tension between controlling destiny and being controlled by it. Guido, who is so accustomed to playing the active role, maintains the illusion of control for the sake of his bright, angelic son, Joshua (Giorgio Cantanni). As they board the train to the concentration camp, Guido joyfully announces to Joshua, "I got this ticket just in time." The various pains Guido takes to protect his son from fear are elaborate, marvelous, and nothing short of heart-rending.

They are also implausible under Nazi supervision. That's one interesting lapse in the movie: the bad guys are also bad fascists. The train literally doesn't run on time when Dora, who is not Jewish, tracks down her family at the station and demands to join them. The officer complies, ordering the train to stop. Whether he thinks he's giving her what she deserves in a generous or a malicious sense is not clear. But his "Well...okay" attitude contradicts the conventional image of Nazis as presented in movies like Schindler's List. In the latter film, Nazis shoot Jews for sport; in Life is Beautiful, there's hardly a hint of violence. The separation between the men and women seems more like boys' and girls' summer camps. When Guido uses the loudspeaker to broadcast his love for Dora, no consequences ensue. Among the many paradoxes of the film is that of the lax Nazi.

The Nazis are also pretty insignificant in Life is Beautiful. Benigni doesn't bother to explore their psyche; hell, he doesn't even bother to translate the German. All the shouted German unaccompanied by subtitles is a symbol: these "big mean guys who yell" just don't make any sense. Benigni doesn't explain them, and we don't understand them any more than Joshua does.

"Life is beautiful" is a bold statement to make without your tongue in your cheek. In this day and age, such a statement is either disdainful or disdained, dripping with either sarcasm or syrup. There is, however, a delicate space that eludes both cynicism and sentimentality--suspended between them and, usually, obscured by them. In Life is Beautiful, Robert Benigni illuminates this space with extraordinary vision. It's tempting to call his story bittersweet, but more accurate to say that it penetrates the surfaces of both bitterness and sweetness, unearthing piercing purity.

Sites related to this article
NOTE: SITE WILL APPEAR IN A NEW BROWSER WINDOW

• The official site for Life is Beautiful

  Back to A&E...