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Roberto Benigni uses humour to hide the horrors of the Holocaust from his son in Life is Beautiful |
Director: Roberto Benigni
Cast: Roberto Benigni (Guido Orefice), Nicoletta Braschi
(Dora Orefice), Giorgio Cantarini (Giosue Orefice), Giustino Durano (Uncle
Eliseo), Horst Buchhoolz (Dr Lessing), Marisa Paredes (Dora’s mother), Sergio
Bustric (Ferruccio)
How can we confront the dark facts of our past? It’s a
question that perhaps feels more relevant with each passing day. History is
full of horrors and terrible deeds. And it’s easy to think of those who lived
through terrible events as merely victims, a single homogenous mass of the
suffering. Life is Beautiful however
tries to look at perhaps the most terrible of events, the Holocaust, with an
eye that acknowledges the terror but also suggests that love and hope can exist
alongside the worst parts of humanity.
In Tuscany in 1939, Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni) is a
sharp-witted, if accident-prone, waiter who dreams of setting himself up as a
bookshop owner. He falls in love with Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) and, after a
courtship involving “accidental” meetings, comic interludes and finally Dora
leaving her engagement party (where she is due to marry a brutish bully), they
marry. A few years later they have a son, Giosue (Giogio Cantarini). But the
war has gone against Italy, and now Guido and Giosue, as Jews, are arrested and
sent to a concentration camp. There Guido does everything he can to try and protect
his son from the horrors around him, by pretending the camp is an elaborate
game to win a tank, with points won if he can hide from the guards and not cry.
Guido spins his own forced labour, and danger of execution, to Giosue as part
of the same game.
Directed by and starring Roberto Benigni, Life is Beautiful was Benigni’s
statement that events as terrible as the Holocaust cannot drive hope and love
from a father’s heart, and that both tears and laughter can come from the same
beautiful place in the human spirit. It’s been called a comedy about the
Holocaust, but that’s unfair. Guido may use comedy and try to turn everything
that happens to them into a camp an elaborate game for his son – but that’s to
stop a 5-year-old child from being traumatised. For us watching, we know the
terrible place Guido and his son are in – and we know the appalling things that
are happening around them.
Life is Beautiful
is really two films, and only one of them is a comedy. The first half is a
Chaplain-esque love story, a clumsy but good-hearted and comic scruff-pot
winning the heart of a decent and loving woman. It’s full of the sort of slapstick
and comic routines you could expect from the masters of classic American silent
comedy. It hits every expected beat, from our hero being the sort of wily but
honest and kind little guy we can root for, to all his opponents being
sharp-suited bullies while his love is charming and tender. For the first half
of the film there is little that, really, stands this film out from the
ordinary. Benigni is a charming performer – with just the right mix of
bashfulness and bombast – but it’s nothing you’ve not seen before.
But then that half of the film exists to give the second
half of the film its power. As soon as the time-jump happens, it’s like
watching the Little Tramp wander into a horrific tragedy. From the moment Guido
closes the shutters on his shop – to reveal the words “Jewish Store” graffitied
across it – the sunny Tuscan world around our heroes grows darker and darker.
Benigni deliberately avoided a sense of realism to his
Holocaust imagery – he felt only documentary could really do it justice, so
avoided making his death camp look or feel anything like a real camp – but the
audience is more than capable of filling in the blanks. The second half of the
film, with Guido and his son in the camp, is not funny at all. But that doesn’t
stop Guido busting a gut to entertain his son at every moment – or prevent us
building a deep emotional connection with a father who is suppressing his own
pain and fear in order to try and protect his son. The father who knows the
business of this camp is death, who knows that Dora has also been arrested and
placed in the women’s camp. Who knows their only hope is to pray the war ends
before they die. It’s bleak stuff, and the fact that Guido keeps up a front of
humour doesn’t make the film a comedy.
It’s why it the second half of the film carries such impact.
Not only have we invested in the comedic warmth of these characters in the
first half, but seeing them trying to keep hope alive in their own way in the
bleakest of situations is completely moving. Sure there are funny moments – the
most notable being Guido’s improvised interpretation of the guard’s explanation
of the camp rules into an explanation of the rules of the game he is trying to
get his son to believe in – but really it’s not a comedy because we know too
well the dangers that surround them.
Sure the film is sentimental and in many ways manipulative.
It would be hard pressed to not
create emotional moments from such material, and from the sacrifices of
Benigni’s character. But it still works and the film has a few shrewd moments
of personal insight, not least from the introduction of Horst Buchholz’s German
doctor. Dr Lessing knows Guido from his days as a waiter in Tuscany – but
encountering him in the camp waiting tables at the officers’ mess, it doesn’t
even begin to occur to him that Guido’s position has changed or his family’s lives
are in mortal danger. The dehumanising of this extermination system doesn’t
just turn people into murderers, it turns decent people into thoughtless
observers.
Life is Beautiful does
carry a real emotion wallop towards its end. It was famous as “the Holocaust
comedy”, but it uses comedy and the conventions of Hollywood romance to build
our empathy for characters who then find themselves in a Holocaust movie. And it treats the Holocaust itself with a deep reverence and respect, never making the deaths of millions anything like a joke. Sure,
you could argue that it still downplays the terrors of the Holocaust – but then
we know the background so well, do we need the gaps all filled in? And while
you might say hope from such a terrible setting is not the message that should
come out, sometimes it feels like the message we need.
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