Finally, I get to see a movie. I saw "Life
is Beautiful" over the weekend. (Has this already gotten
comment?) I suppose the Holocaust is the last setting one would
place a comedy, but in this case, the story worked quite
effectively. It's the story of an Italian Jewish waiter in the
late 1930s who falls in love with a rich beautiful girl, they
marry and have a beautiful son. Because it is during WWII, there
are the boorish fascists and Nazis running around, harrassing
Jews, but that does little to bother the love or humor of these
characters -- till the day they end up in a concentration camp.
There's little slap stick here, and in fact, in its bright colors
and tone, the movie is a fable (a narrator says as much at the
beginning). The final scene explains why the fable like technique
was used.
It's a tough subject for a fiction because it's
too easy to show who the good guys are and who aren't, it's open
to excessive sentimentality and because we already have images in
our head about it. I think this movie does work because, in the
end, we learn who is telling the story. Learning that, we learn
why the focus of the story is set as it is without taking the
fascists as seriously as a straight-on realistic movie would
have.
