Italian - La Vita e Bella

     La Vita e Bella (or Life is Beautiful) directed by and starring Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, is celebration of life, love and most of all, a modern fairy tale. It stars The lighthearted angle of this film, though set around Holocaust times, has been criticized by many who feel it made a mockery out of a tragic situation but many others feel it to show the resilience of love and life in a tragic and hopeless world.
     The reason one could label it under “fairy tale” is due to its many blatant characteristic and parallels: the poor and humble man one day meets a beautiful princess and falls in love with her. She is charmed by him but is already engaged to/under power of a rich and powerful man. The ...peasant rides up on a horse and saves her, carrying her into the distance to live happily ever after.
     The film is split up into two parts, before and after the fairy tale. The first part introduces the characters as any story would and brings them along the hero’s journey until he “rescues” his fair lady and rides off. At no point is one afraid that “the princess” would change her mind and run off with the wrong man because that’s not how stories of this nature end up. Everything that could be negative is also lightened and put through an almost naïve filter so that the audience can feel a sense of safety and security in the plot.

     The second part of the film is the one most criticized and controversial, the portrayal of the Holocaust and the treatment of the imprisoned Jews. Some critics ask “What was Bergnini thinking when he made a comedy featuring this terrible event?” It is believed that instead of making fun of it, he was trying to continue on with the child like view portrayal of the story as seen in the first part. Although the general audience watches the movie with the knowledge of what is happening, the child character in the film is oblivious so in the spirit of storytelling, the film continues on as if made for a more naïve audience of children Giosues’ age. When Guido, for example, is taken off to the police station to be “interviewed”, we know as young adults educated in world history that he is being checked to see if he is genetically liable to be thrown into the concentration camps. Also, the camera doesn’t then go with Guido to the interview, it stays on the little boy and we can easily forget about it as if it were nothing, like the son perceives it to be. Guido also connects to his wife in almost “magical” kinds of ways, projecting his voice and music throughout the grim Nazi death camp in the harshest of times.
In all I think that this is a wonderful film that has strong message, portrayed in a surreal way and is a must see on anyone’s film list.