Life is Beautiful: When There is Love

                                                     

Life Is Beautiful (Italian: La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian tragi comedy-drama film directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish Italian book shop owner, who must employ his fertile imagination to shield his son from the horrors of internment in a Nazi concentration camp. The film was a critical and financial success and Benigni won the Academy Award for the Best Actor at the 71st Academy Awards as well as the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The movie is set in Italy and the story tells that in 1939, a Jewish-Italian named Guido Orefice comes into Arezzo, Italy, to open a book store. In the meantime, he works as a waiter at the hotel restaurant where his uncle Eliseo works as maître-d. Guido meets a school teacher named Dora. They fall in love and eventually get married. From their marriage they have a son named Giosue’. However, when Giosué turns five years and everything seems going well in their lives, the Germans occupies Italy and take away all the Jews included Guido, Eliseo and Giosué to a labor camp. Dora insists she be taken too to stay together her family, but she is housed in the women's side of the camp. To protect Giosué from the horror of what is happening to them, Guido tells him that they are playing a game where the first person that earns 1000 point wins a real tank. Guido with his amazing imagination explains to Giosue’ that all the bad things that happen in the camp are part of the game and also that the

Germans are only the actors of the game. In Addition, although Guido cannot see his wife in the camp, he manages to make her to hear his voice everyday with the best phrase that every woman would like to hear just upon awakening, which is “Good morning Princess”. 

In my point of view, this a movie is a masterpiece of cinema because no one before the filmmaker Roberto Benigni had managed make a movie that tells about a sad fact like the Holocaust in an almost playful way. In Life is Beautiful, about 90% of the story is told in an ironic tone almost touching comedy, except the final scene when Guido dies, but not before to hiding his son from the Germans and from possibility the same fate. In this movie it is possible to feel the true meaning of the word love, trough the way and the attitude Guido uses to protect his family to alleviate their difficult days in the labor camp. To underline the excellent interpretations of Nicoletta Braschi (Dora) and Giorgio Cantarini ( Giosue’) in addition to that of Roberto Benigni and the marvelous music made  by Nicola Piovani. Life is Beautiful is the confirmation that many times a movie made with a small budget, but well directed and well played by actors, it can give much more than a movie made with millions of dollars. In my opinion, is a must see!