Life Is Beautiful [La vita è bella] ***** (1997, Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini, Marisa Paredes, Horst Buchholz) – Classic Movie Review 415

This triple-Oscar-winning 1999 Italian movie is a triumph for its mastermind, Roberto Benigni, who walked off with the Best Actor Oscar and the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar as its director. One for each end of the mantelpiece. He won the Bafta as Best Actor too.

Tuscan-born Roberto Benigni won the best actor Oscar for his role as Guido, a carefree Jewish hotel waiter and book shop owner in a Italian pre-World War Two small town, who falls for, courts and marries the lovely young Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) from a nearby town.

Life is indeed beautiful. All seems perfect when they have a son Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini), until their world is shattered when German forces occupy Italy and in 1945 the Nazis begin to round up Italian Jews and send them to death camps. Guido and Joshua are taken away to a Jewish concentration camp, but in the camp, Guido constructs an elaborate fantasy game to comfort and protect his son from the horrors around them.  Guido imagines that the Holocaust is a game and that the grand prize for winning is a tank. He pretends that life is still beautiful.

Charlie Chaplin-esque comedy may not be to all tastes, especially with Benigni’s daft clowning at the start, but the does exercise an incredibly powerful hold and is a noble, good-hearted enterprise.

Also co-written and directed by Benigni, it’s impeccably crafted too, and he ensures that finally the story is heartbreaking. There’s beautiful cinematography from Tonino Delli Colli, a notable Oscar-winning score by Nicola Piovani and impressive period sets from production designer Danilo Donati.

It’s filmed in Italian and there’s some German spoken too.

Benigni is the first actor to win a Best Actor Oscar for a non-English speaking role. Fellow Italian Sophia Loren also won an Oscar a non-English speaking role (Two Women in 1960). Benigni and Laurence Olivier (Hamlet, 1948) are the only two actors to have directed themselves in Oscar winning performances. In 2003 Benigni won the Razzie Award for Worst Actor in Pinocchio.

Winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar as its director, he famously climbed on the back of the seat for his procession to the stage and applauded the audience. When he went on stage again to receive his best actor Oscar, he said: ‘Thank you. This is a terrible mistake, because I used up all my English!’ And then: ‘I would like to thank my parents in Vergaio, a little village in Italy. They gave me the biggest gift: poverty.’

In real life Benigni married Braschi on Boxing Day 2001. They first met on the set of You Upset Me (1983).

His father Luigi Benigni (1918-2004), who worked as a farmer, carpenter and bricklayer, was a prisoner in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen between 1943 and 1945. Roberto used his stories as the basis for his film.

After it received seven Academy Award nominations, he met Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, shook his hand and said; ‘Now I have the Oscar in my hand!’

Horst Buchholz plays the role of a doctor, Doctor Lessing, who befriends Benigni’s character Guido and frequently duels with him in riddles.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Film Review 415 derekwinnert.com