Word: benigni
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Life is Beautiful is a truly rare and unexpected creation: a comedy about the Holocaust. One of several miracles that writer, director, and actor Roberto Benigni performs in this film is to convince the audience that this is not a contradiction in terms. Benigni believes in his film's title, and it is this optimism which makes the movie's unlikely concept work. This celebration of the imagination in the face of so much reality--not just in the movie's plot but in its whole visual and emotional style--is a brave choice that will make this film...
This is life in a Nazi concentration camp as presented by Roberto Benigni, the star, director and co-writer (with Vincenzo Cerami) of Life Is Beautiful, which has been winning awards and high popularity in Europe. Benigni won't--can't--have it any other way, for even a hint of the truth about the Holocaust would crush his comedy and reduce to absurdity his "fable" about a man named Guido making a sort of hide-and-seek game out of camp life, diverting his four-year-old son (Giorgio Cantarini) from its harshness and encouraging...
...also fair to say that Benigni--whose self-love, if not his comic skills, could charitably be described as Chaplinesque, or perhaps more accurately as Robin Williamsish--devotes much of his film to peacetime passages overestablishing Guido's childlike yet shrewd, cheeky yet romantic character as a wise innocent, an idealized Everyman. His pursuit of his principessa, who is engaged to a local Fascist leader (and is sweetly played by Benigni's wife Nicoletta Braschi), and his casually farcical assaults on decorum and authority are, if you have a taste for simpleton comedy, inoffensive...
...first hour of the film passes like a dream. There's a good deal of slapstick humor (flower pots and eggs falling on the heads of government officials, Benigni paying so much attention to Dora in his restaurant that he ends up carrying a live poodle on his serving tray), complemented by a lyrical and occasionally surreal style. Benigni's talent as a wordsmith is also evident: no knowledge of Italian is necessary to understand that he has a way with the language that is highly amusing in itself. There are also, however, hints of what is to come...
...film to sober up at this point, and it does, but it never sacrifices the lyricism and humor which are integral to both the story and to Guido's personality. There are a few truly harrowing scenes, but the violence and politics are largely external to the story--Benigni assumes that we know all that already, and the film barely features a single swastika. The movie defiantly clings to humor and hope in the face of ultimate tragedy...