La Vita è bella (1997) - film review

Italy, 1939.  Leaving his home in the country, Guido Orefice moves to a town in Tuscany to get a job as a waiter.  There he meets and falls in love with a young schoolteacher, Dora, but she is already betrothed to another man.  At the last moment, Dora chooses Guido over her dull fiancé.  Five years later, they have a son, Giosué, and Guido run a successful bookshop.  Despite the fact that Guido is a Jew, he and his family are ignored by the Nazi soldiers – until one day Dora returns home to find their house wrecked and her son and husband missing.  She discovers that they have been sent by train to the concentration camp, and insists that she be put on the same train.  When they arrive at the camp, Guido tries to convince his son that this is all a game for his benefit, the prize being a full-size tank if they can earn 1000 points…

It takes genius and unimaginable bravado to make a comedy about the Nazi Holocaust, and both are very much in evidence in Roberto Benigni’s tragicomic masterpiece, La Vita è bella.  Although it has been reviled by some critics for its attempts to make light-hearted fun out of one of the worst incidents in human history, this is unquestionably a great film.   Through the universal language of comedy, which it exploits brilliantly, the film communicates directly with its audience and succeeds in conveying the horror of the situation in which it is set without ridiculing it.  All great comedy is fundamentally based around survival, and in La Vita è bella that principle is taken to its utmost extreme.  Far from being an inconsequential piece of comedy, the film is a hugely engaging piece of humanist art which tells a tragic tale in a original and effective way.

The film was written and directed by Roberto Benigni, a popular comic actor in Italy, who also takes the leading role in the film.  Benigni’s colourful performance ranges from the absurdly comic to the heart-renderingly poignant, yet his portrayal is both convincing and sympathetic.  The first half of the film, which serves to establish the characters and the period, gives Benigni plenty of opportunity for trying out his conventional brand of physical comedy.  Benigni only really comes into his own in the film’s second half, where his attempts at comedy amidst the horrors of the concentration camp take on a tragic and heroic dimension.   The other star of the film is Giorgio Cantarini, who plays Benigni’s son in the film, a realistic performance which gives the film much of its drive and emotional impact.  Some of the scenes with Benigni and Cantarini are pure magic.

Despite some vociferous negative criticism in some quarters, La Vita è bella proved to be a great success for its director, winning both critical acclaim and its fare share of awards.  Having picked up the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1998, it garnered no less than 7 Academy Awards n 1998, winning three awards in the best Foreign Language Film, best Actor and Best Original Score categories.

© James Travers 2002

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