(See the description and contents of my article in the post below)

The triumph of the human spirit

(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. 

 

  

Beautiful dreamer Peter Kobel review in Premiere magazine

Courage

“To be yourself in a world which does its best, night and day, to make you just like everybody else is the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.” – e.e. cummings

             Call me twisted but whenever I see out-and-out gays and lesbians, I see embodiments of courage. You see, these brethren of ours could have just hidden in the closet; but, no, they would rather suffer ostracism and indignation for being who they really are rather than nestle in their zones of comfort and safety.They could have just as easily acted out a different persona or pass themselves off as what they are not (magkunwari) in order to be easily assimilated into our intolerant society and be just like everybody else. But then again, they chose to “walk proudly in the light than die a slow death”. That’s courage.

                Courage is the link to our eventual progress and success as a species—quite a grandiose claim but I believe it is true.

Remember the many instances of courage in history and in our society without which we wouldn’t have propelled forward.

               Galileo and Nicolaus Copernicus had courage. They espoused ideas at a time when the prevailing mindset would have considered their ideas crazy and heretic. Without them we would still have maintained our paradigm of celestial hegemony—that is, that we are at the center of the vast universe. What humbugs we could all have been! Without them, we would have limited our desire for discovery to, literally, the corners of our world. We would not have acknowledged that we are just a tiny speck of dust and that there is so much more to see, explore and discover out there.

              

                    Fighting for your ideas not knowing if you are right, and despite colossal opposition—that’s courage. Einstein, too, had courage.He shook the scientific community when he challenged the then prevailing Newtonian physics as a way to explain the expanding universe. His idea of a time-space continuum, as opposed to Newton’s law of gravitation, is much better at explaining the celestial workings of the universe.

               

                Columbus was also the epitome of courage. When everybody else believed that the world was flat and unimaginable monsters inhabited the oceans, he went out to circumnavigate the world and discovered the New World.

                    Rosa Parks had courage. At a time when Blacks were discriminated and considered “slave material”, she didn’t give up her bus seat for a white man asserting that everybody should be treated equally. For a Black, and a woman at that, that was courage personified! Without her and all the others that came after her (e.g. Martin Luther King), we would all still be slaves (pun intended) to the idea that slavery is acceptable and that some groups of people are bound to be subservient to others.

                   So how are the above examples related to my assertion that out-and-out gays and lesbians are courage personified?

                    

                    The inference could not be missed. They (the gender-benders) are examples of people who refused to be shackled by societal norms, expectations and conventions. So do Galileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Columbus, and Parks.

                   

                   Okay, the comparison is a little bit forced.

                But we don’t really know the roots of lesbianism or homosexuality, so why would we be quick to judge it and dismiss it as something that has to be curtailed?

                     Conversely, the presence of fear is what courage is not: fear of the unknown, fear of the “different”, fear of the unconventional, “fear” of people who may not necessarily be like you or me in terms of color, orientation, sexuality, beliefs, etc. This kind of fear breeds intolerance; intolerance breeds disrespect; disrespect breeds subjugation.

                   Courage is two sides of the same coin. Courage makes people assert their diversity. That same courage can also make us accept that diversity.

So next time you see gays and lesbians, have the courage (and tolerance) to accept such difference and diversity. Just like those courageous people in history who were originally seen as “different”, they might just lead us to positive surprises just around the corner in the byways of our development and progress as a species. You’ll never know.

(This piece was written November 25, 2004. I found it in my journal)