We just finished watching the 1997 Italian film La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful).
Completely swept away.
That’s what we were by the sheer beauty of the film.
Directed by Roberto Benigni (who also plays the lead character Guido), Life is Beautiful is a brilliant tragicomedy, the likes of which come along once in two decades at best.
And the kind of classy movie, our Indian schmucks can’t imagine putting out in a million years.
Set in Italy of 1939, Life is Beautiful starts off as just another funny foreign movie but midway veers off in a different direction and ends as one of the great tragicomedies in motion picture history.
It’s after Guido, his young son, wife and uncle are carted off to a Nazi Concentration Camp (because they’re Jews) that the movie comes into its own.
We won’t tell you the details lest we spoil your joy but Guido launches one of the first amusing and tragic games farces in the concentration camp.
Pitted as Guido and his camp-mates are against a brutal, murderous regime you know it’s ultimately not going to end well but yet can’t help getting up caught up in the game.
Roberto Benigni, who plays first a waiter, then a bookshop owner and finally a Nazi concentration camp inmate is an extraordinary actor who animates the screen with his presence.
Fittingly, he’s often described as Italy’s ‘National Treasure.’
Roberto Benigni’s real-life wife Nicoletta Braschi, who plays his beloved ‘Princessa’ and wife Dora, is most certainly not a bad actress herself but no match for Roberto in the acting department.Continue reading »
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