Life Is Beautiful
| Life Is Beautiful | |
|---|---|
 Original film poster | |
| Directed by | Roberto Benigni |
| Written by | Roberto Benigni, Vincenzo Cerami |
| Produced by | Gianluigi Braschi, John M. Davis, Elda Ferri |
| Starring | Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giustino Durano |
| Distributed by | Miramax Films (USA) |
Release dates |  20 December 1997 23 October, 1998 6 November, 1998 26 December, 1998 12 February, 1999 5 March, 1999 |
Running time | 116 minutes |
| Languages | Italian, German, English |
Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian language film which tells the story of a Jewish Italian, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the film), who lives in his own romantic fairy tale world, but must learn how to use his fertile imagination to help his son survive their internment in a Nazi concentration camp.
Title
The title derives from Leon Trotsky's last testament;[citation needed] while in exile in Mexico, knowing he was soon to be assassinated by Stalin's agents, Trotsky saw his wife in the garden and wrote:
- "Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full."
Plot
The first half of the movie is a whimsical, romantic comedy and often slapstick. Guido, a young Italian Jew, arrives in Arezzo where he sets up a bookstore. Guido is both funny and charismatic, especially when he romances Dora (Italian, but not Jewish), whom he steals – at her engagement – from her rude and loud fiancé. Several years pass, in which Guido and Dora have a son, Giosuè (written Joshua in the English subtitles). In the film, Giosuè is around six years old. However, both the beginning and ending of the film is narrated by an older Giosuè.
In the second half of the movie, Guido, his uncle, and Giosuè are taken to a concentration camp on Giosuè's birthday. Dora demands to join her family and is permitted to do so. In an attempt to keep up Giosuè's spirits, Guido convinces him that the camp is just a game – a game in which the first person to get a thousand points wins a tank. He tells Giosuè that if you complain for hunger you lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn points, etc. He convinces Giosuè that the camp guards are mean because they want the tank for themselves, that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game, and puts off every attempt of Giosuè's ending the game and returning home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant death and disease, Giosuè doesn't question this fiction both because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence.
Guido maintains this story right until the end, when – in the chaos caused by the American advance drawing near – he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. After trying to find Dora, Guido is caught, taken away, and is shot by a Nazi guard, but not before making his son laugh one last time. Giosuè managed to survive, and he thinks he won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp, and is reunited with Dora, his mother.
The movie twice includes music from Offenbach's operetta Les Contes d'Hoffmann (Tales of Hoffmann), with its melody "Barcarola". It is first played at an opera house during Guido's and Dora's courtship; later, Guido surreptitiously plays it over the concentration camp's loudspeaker in an effort to communicate hope to his wife and others.
Awards
The movie made the Cannes Film Festival in 1998, winning the Grand Prize of the Jury. It then went on to win Academy Awards for Best Music, Original Dramatic Score and Best Foreign Language Film. Benigni won Best Actor for his role. The film was additionally nominated for Academy Awards for Directing, Film Editing, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay, and is ranked 85th on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 rated films as voted by nearly sixty thousand users as of May 2007.
See also
- The Day the Clown Cried (1972), an unfinished film by Jerry Lewis
External links
