Life Is Beautiful

Life Is Beautiful, La vita è bella (1997), Directed by Roberto Benigni. Starring Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, and Giorgio Cantarini.


This is the best movie ever made. It pulls on your heart more than any other movie because the characters and situations will make you smile and laugh from romance and comedy, frown in anger from fear, and then cry from a pride which will leave the viewer in a greater appreciation for life, and love, with special attention to the relationship between a loving father and his son and wife.

Everyone should see this film. The main characters are charming and the love between this family is epic. How can one make a funny, charming film about being in a Nazi concentration camp, impossible but true. I see it at least once a year.

I absolutely love this movie, heartbreaking though it is...the quality was good, clear and came in a good condition with its case and all..happy with the purchase..valued addition to my vintage collection.

I really found the over the top humor a little bizzare and somewhat inappropriate - but it's obviously a powerful moving story. It lost me as things started unravelling and it was like this man was still somewhat clueless. And the fact that he seemed clueless - made the humor to me seem bizzare. It would have been more believable had he really been 100% aware of what he was doing. But there were times in the movie that he wasn't really aware of what he was doing ...

Life Is Beautiful is an extraordinarily significant work of art. Screenwriter/Director/Actor Roberto Benigni takes Tragicomedy to new heights, even as he pays tribute to the finest work of Charles Chaplin. Benigni plays Guido, an Italian Jew whose ethnicity is suddenly and shockingly targeted by the Nazis at a time when he is growing a young family- after having, literally, fallen upon the "Princesa," the woman of his dreams- as well as a fine bookstore.

A genuinely happy, warm and charming person, Guido, along with millions of other Jewish people, is now beset by woes of almost horrificaly unimaginable proportions as he and his little boy are taken away by the Nazis to a concentration camp. His intent, no matter what may follow and above all else except keeping his child physically alive in Auschwitz, a place and time where Jewish children were systematically gassed and killed, is to protect the innocence of his young son by pretending the whole horror is a game, the end of which, if he plays right, is to win a tank.

Guido's wife, who is not Jewish and not sent on the train, insists on accompanying the rest of her family, husband and son, to Auschwitz, much to the surprise of the Nazi soldier at the train station; her life is her loved ones, something he does not understand.

The strikingly beautiful cinematography- including exceptionally rich use of color, choice of camera shots and movement, set- and costume design-, editing, stirring musical score and fine surrealistic touch reminiscent of Fellini, make this film enjoyable and poetic in a visual sense, because there is rhyme and reason to each decision made by Benigni as screenwriter and director, as they blend with the dialogue, acting, story and theme to create a finely crafted, richly inspired, tragicomic masterpiece that brings forth tears of abject sadness amid the light of Guido's sense of play and fatherly protection- "You always did want to go on a trip," he softly tells his little boy as they are carted off in the death train amid the foreboding musical passage that accompanies this shot.

This seems bizarre but it is only the beginning of this man's overwhelming desire to shield his beloved child from the pain of the reality that confonts their family. In fact this preparation was actually, in a sense, begun before that, when Josue playfully hid from his mother in a little cabinet to avoid taking his bath, with his father in collusion with the game, something that winds up saving him from the fake "bath" at the camp.

The use of extreme close-ups is reserved by director-screenwriter Benigni for the most poignant point in the film, where a final wink from Guido to little Josue hiding in the cabinet places the seal on the reality of their game of survival and preservation of the child's innocence.

Survival in the physical sense and also in the emotional or psychological sense is Guido's role as father/protector of his child. Other high cinematic/editing feats include those such as the skillful, unobstrusive change of time from the courting of his wife stage to the realization of their family they created, five years later,in one single shot. This makes clear the family/child they created is a direct result of the love they have for each other. Cinematic poetry is unfortunately a rare phenomenon on the big screen, so this one is a true gem. It should be watched in the original Italian, because the true voices of the characters that people this film belong to them and should be heard by all.