Review of Life Is Beautiful (a.k.a. Vita è Bella, La)

Introduction

Italian Jew Guido (Roberto Benigni), falls head over heels in love with the gorgeous school teacher Dora (a muted, enchanting Nicoletta Braschi) and finds that the path of true love never runs smooth when your perfect match is hitched with an Bourgeois Fascist. This is delightful, light-hearted farce, packed with humour and a genuine sense of romance. Unfortunately when Dora, Guido and their young son Joshua (Georgio Cantarini) are carted off to the Concentration Camp, things take a turn for the worse, in every sense imaginable.

Video

A widescreen presentation, since the film was produced on such a low budget, its unsurprising that the print is less that great, however the film’s elaborate sets still manage to look great.

Audio

A pretty spotless transfer sonically, although it doesn’t matter greatly since this is mainly a visual piece.

Features

Those nice people at Disney have given us the kind bonus of providing English subtitles for this Italian language film. Unfortunately, they haven’t bothered to do anything else. Whoops.

Conclusion

A fun loving, feel good comedy about The Holocaust? Although it may sound audacious and virtually insulting, Roberto Benigni’s romantic tragi-farce starts as if he may well pull it off. The first half of the film is genuinely wonderful, played and directed with a spell-binding sense of love and joy, revelling in the delight of discovery.

The problem is during the film’s concentration camp bound second half, Benigni can’t seem to alter his tone between the beauty of love and the horror of hate, never mind attempting to forge the bond between them. So he doesn’t bother, he goes for a wavering, middling compromise: optimistic, humanistic, yet with a brush stroke of brutality, the effect is bizarrely nihilistic. As Guido hides the horrors of the Holocaust from his young son, so to does Benigni hide the horror from us, the audience. In a sense, the film treats us all like children, a sentimentalised censorship that is both quietly offensive and completely self-defeating. For all its magic and romance, ‘Life Is Beautiful’ ultimately can’t even look its own ambivalent self in the mirror. It becomes a grotesque lie, a deliberate distortion of a horrendous human truth. Its no coincidence that its creator’s name includes the word ‘benign’, happiness is woven so deeply into ‘Life Is Beautiful’, that pain becomes a distant memory, a dark, insidious notion, impossible to grasp. ‘Life is Beautiful’, despite its spunk and vitality, is a film of very little colour.