by Adam Ritchie, Contributing Writer
Welcome to a new year of time travel with 20th Century Flicks, folks! I have had a hard time deciding which of the 20th century gems I will bring to you to begin 2022, as I have seen so many great “old” films over the past month or two. My final decision has boiled down to a film that made me feel the most emotion, and truth be told, I actually changed my mind while I was writing this very paragraph.
The film was released in 1997, but the year I remember most was 1998, when the most charming and funny little Italian man took over Hollywood in a big way. Roberto Benigni was EVERYWHERE due to his utterly brilliant film La vita é bella, or Life is beautiful,which he wrote, starred in, and directed.
Nominated for seven Oscars including nominations for, Best Picture, Director, original screenplay, and editing, and winning three Oscars for Best Actor (Benigni) Best Foreign language film and best score, it also won Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, among a plethora of other international awards. It was a cultural phenomenon at the time, all due to Benigni winning us all over during his campaign trail, being hilarious with his minimal English and over-the-top antics
The film begins in 1939 Italy when Jewish man Guido Oreface (Benigni) is traveling with his brother Giorgio to work in their uncle’s Tuscan hotel. Along the way, the girl of his dreams, Dora, (Nicoletta Braschi) literally falls into his arms as they stop for a roadside stall. He later sees her in the city near his hotel, discovering she is a schoolteacher, and engaged to a local official Rodolfo, whom he has already given a hilarious, but bad impression too. Making connections as a waiter in the hotel bistro, trading riddles with an obsessive doctor who agonizes over the riddles to the point they totally consume him, Guido meets the school inspector and subsequently sabotages him so he doesn’t receive his wake-up call. Guido then enters the school pretending to be the inspector just to get close to, and impress Dora.
Later, Rodolfo and Dora are host a large soiree in the hotel to announce their upcoming nuptials. Guido, seeing Dora is not at all, happy rides in on a horse that has been graffitied with anti-Semitic slogans to steal her away.
We fast forward — with a stunning transition by the way — to 1944. Guido and Dora have a young son Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini), and they run a bookstore. The tone of the film shifts, as occupied Northern Italy is now a very different place, and the bookstore has been labelled as a Jewish store; Guido and Giosué can only look through the window at the treats, so close, but so far inside a bakery that doesn’t allow Jewish people.
On Giosué’s birthday, Nazis round up the Jews of the town and force them onto a train to go to a concentration camp. Dora is not Jewish, so she is not taken; however, she protests with a German guard and insists she goes on the train to be with her husband and son. At the camp, women are separated from the men, and Giosué is left with his father in the cramped confines with the other adult men. To protect his son form the truth, Guido tells Giosué this is all a game for his birthday and the winner will win a real tank. When the Germans ask for an interpreter, Guido volunteers, even though he can’t speak German. He translates what is being said for his son’s benefit, making out that the guard is telling all the players the rules of the game.
As the Jews are put to back-breaking labor, we quickly learn the elderly and children are being taken for a shower and never returning, so Guido hides Giosué in the name of the ‘game’. In the interests of not spoiling the rest of the film, I will leave off with the plot points here.
The first act of Life is beautiful hearkens back classic romantic comedies of the Hollywood golden era of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and is properly hysterical. There are gag setups that you don’t see coming until you do, and the realization of knowing the joke is coming is what makes made it even funnier for me — the reactive performances sell the gag so well.
The second act eases you into the darker and frankly heart-wrenching final act. Much like Jojo Rabbit from 2019, Life is Beautiful is mostly a lighter look at life before the holocaust, but it doesn’t shy away from the atrocities that occurred and the real situation faced by the Jews during WWII. If you enjoyed Jojo Rabbit but haven’t yet seen Life is Beautiful,I urge you to get to it sooner rather than later, but be sure to bring your tissues. I bawled my eyes out as a 20-year-old (when I didn’t have kids) when I first saw it, and also at 44 (post-children) on my second viewing.
Life really is beautiful, especially when you have someone to protect from it to make it beautiful for them.
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