Word: guido
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Love is the seed from which the story germinates. The first half of the film--which takes places against the beautiful landscape of a Tuscan village in the early 1940s--follows Benigni's character, a hapless, intelligent and endearing waiter named Guido, as he courts a local schoolteacher, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi). Dora, who is engaged to a Fascist official, falls for his antics from the start, though it takes time for her to decide to leave her other life behind...
...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, but it's not in Guido's nature to let these threats impede his lifestyle. When Guido's family horse is spray-painted green and covered with anti-Semitic slogans, he uses it to carry Dora away from her Fascist husband-to-be. In another scene, Guido pretends to be chief inspector at a school...
Marital bliss is interrupted a few years later when Guido, Dora and their son Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini, a wonderfully precocious little actor) are taken to a Nazi concentration camp three months before the end of the war. One would expect the 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...
...Kiss Me Guido...
Other highlights of the reading list: "Intimacy, labor and class: Ideologies of feminine sexuality in the Punk slam dance;" "Guido: Fashioning an Italian-American Youth Style;" and "Jocks and Freaks: The symbolic structure of the expression of social interaction among American high school students...