(The following essay appeared in the My Favorite Movie column, Entertainment Section, of The Philippine Star dated November 28, 2004 )
How does one protect the unspoiled innocence of a child when what he sees around him is a world at war, racism, hatred and the disintegration of his family?
This was the dilemma faced by Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni) in the critically-acclaimed and Oscar-winning Italian movie La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful).
All it takes to conquer the harshness of war is courage, love, positivity and creative imagination.
Life is Beautiful is a poignant story of Guido Orefice , an Italian Jew, his wife Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) and their son Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini) during the Holocaust.
Guido is a very, very optimistic man who fell in love with a pretty schoolteacher, Dora. Dora was unhappily engaged to a high-ranking Fascist official. Due to Guido's charms and persistence, he won Dora's heart.
Guido and Dora fell in love and started a family. Dora bore Guido a son---Giosue. The family would have lived a charmed life if not for the detention of Guido, together with his son Giosue, in the Jewish concentration camp somewhere in the Italian countryside. Dora, a non-Jew but finding no more reason to live if separated from her family, chose also to live in the concentration camp.
The concentration camp is a ruthless place. The Fascist authorities are unforgiving. Guido wants to shield his son from all these ugliness. To achieve this, Guido lied to Giosue by telling him that they are in a big game where the ultimate prize is one of Giosue's most favorite things---a real tank.
It is at this point when the movie takes a delightful, side-splitting yet sporadically sad twist.
Guido constantly contrives ways and means to hide the truth from his son---that is, that they are in a concentration camp, and anytime soon any of the people there may either be executed or gassed in the chambers. Guido's schemes were a buoyant contradiction to the bleakness of the surroundings. It is also these creative tactics of Guido which gives a nice, comical twist to an otherwise drab movie about the Holocaust and the Second World War.
One very, very moving yet hilarious scene in the movie happened inside the headquarters. The concentration camp administrator (a Fascist official) was telling all the prisoners in the room about the rules to be strictly followed inside the concentration camp. Volunteering himself to be the interpreter for the German official, Guido, instead of translating what the German official said, made it appear that the said official was relating the rules of the game they are to play. This brought a smile to Giousue who totally believed his father while the rest of the inmates were completely bewildered. Totally amusing was the abject disparity between Guido's buoyant spirit and mismatched gestures while doing the translation, and the German official's stern words and growling demeanor. Imagine an anti-Semite telling all the inmates (through Guido's wayward translation) that they are all in this big game where they are going to get their favorite things as a prize if they are going to cooperate!
There are many more scenes similar to the one described above interspersed throughout the movie. It is so heart-rending to see the utter disparity of the life situations the movie's characters are in and their constant struggles to keep their optimism alive for their own sake and for the sake of their loved ones. It is this almost Sisyphean struggle that any moviegoer (myself definitely included) could easily relate to.
Just like Benigni's character Guido, we all face life's vicissitudes with as much optimism as we can possibly muster. We may not have been victims of a real war but each of us has his or her own battle to fight. Daily living itself can be hard. Despite this, we keep on going and going and going.
Life is Beautiful is a moving vindication of the power of the human spirit and the strength of the human traits we have all been endowed with but which we sometimes fail to use---traits such as love, optimism, positivity and even creative imagination.
Roberto Benigni's character Guido may have died in the movie (this was not shown but can be clearly inferred) yet he was able to achieve his objective. He was able to protect his young son from all the inhumanities that could have happened in a war. At the end of the movie, Giosue was one of the survivors rescued by the Liberation/Allied forces. And what more befitting way to be rescued than by soldiers riding on tanks! Giosue was profusing with childlike exuberance thinking that the real tank was his prize for winning the game which his father has explained to him. Eventually, Giosue and his mother Dora were happily reunited.
Life is Beautiful is a wonderful movie because it reaffirms my belief in the innate capacity of the human spirit to triumph over insurmountable odds. It gave me inspiration to go on living. Any good movie should do just that, that is, inspire us, motivate us and make us remember what we humans can accomplish with the God-given traits that are instilled in us.
Life is indeed beautiful. Watching this delighful, independent Italian movie is proof of that.
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