Life is Beautiful - La Vita e Bella

Life is beautiful is a lovely Italian film about a Jewish family who is taken to a concentration camp during the second world war. It is extremely creative and touching. The creative part of the movie is that the father, who is taken from his home in Italy along with his son while his wife is out, convinces his son that the whole situation is a big game, to save his son (and maybe himself) from the despair that could come with knowing and thinking about what was really happening.

The first part of the movie is dedicated to the courtship of the boy's parents, and to exemplify the character of the father. He is a bit crazy, a bit silly, creative in all ways, and un-embarrassable. He first meets the girl when he is traveling through the countryside with a friend to his new home in the city. They stop to ask for help when the car breaks down, and she literally falls into his arms from an upper story. It is amusing when right when they meet she is stung by a bee on the inner thigh and he insists on sucking out the poison. Later, they find each other randomly in the street in town, and he learns that she is a teacher in a nearby school. His crazy antics always catch her eye but she insists it is better that they only meet randomly, when he finally asks her out. Meanwhile, he has taken up a job as a waiter in a high-class restaurant, and is trying to gain permission to open up a bookshop, his dream.

He gets a job catering at a wedding, and excitedly he learns that girl in his eye is in attendence! He is getting up to his usual silliness trying to get her attention (sending a cake with a message just for her to the table, for example), when suddenly he realizes that it's her who is getting married! How terrible for him. He pretty much falls over right away when he realizes that. But, in a famous scene she crawls under the table while he is cleaning up something on the floor, and among skirts and shoes she makes it clear that this marriage is not in her personal plans (it is clearly some kind of arrangement) by kissing him passionately under the table and asking him to take her away. And take her away, he does, by riding a ridiculous-looking horse into the hall and picking her up at the head table, to ride off into the sunset with her. He takes her home and the next thing we know, it is their home, it is years later, and they have an adorable son who is just as adventurous and polite as his father. They have the bookshop of his dreams, and the boy for the first time is going to meet his grandmother (who it seems, had abandoned her daughter after the arranged marriage fiasco until now) at his birthday party. But, when the boy's mother arrives back at home with her mother, tragedy has struck. The house is a mess and her husband and son are missing. The tension that has been building during the movie over her husband being Jewish (which I think not even she understood the truth of) and the weight of the war comes to fruition when they have disappeared and are being taken to a concentration camp in Germany . She goes to the train station where the Jews from the town are being loaded onto a train, and when they refuse to let her husband off (she tells them there is a mistake, but they pay no attention), she demands to join them on the train. This is only the first heartbreaking scene. Meanwhile, father and son are being forced to get on the train by German soldiers, and the father begins the saga which he sticks to for the rest of the movie -- that this is all a game, almost like a birthday gift for the boy, a game only for very special and privileged people. As the father says, everthing is organized, everything is planned, and they will soon learn the rules and what they will have to do. Even though the father doesn't know what he is doing, he encourages his son, and not just tells him that it's going to be all right, but acts as if it is going to be the best surprise ever. It is amazing. No matter what happens, he sticks to the story, to save his son from the horror of reality in the concentration camp.

When they arrive, they are separated from the mother, who arrives with them but they haven't been able to talk to. The son says that he is bored of the game, but his father tells him that it's very important, and that it's not going ot be easy, but that the prize is worth it - a tank like the toy his son has at home, except a real one, full size. They are introduced to their living quarters, a cruddy cabin with tightly packed beds and nothing to make it comfortable. The son keeps asking questions, and his father tells him that in this game they have to try to get a thousand points and then they win. This all seems a little ridiculous, but the way it is presented is brilliant in a way that makes it pretty believable. When the German soldiers come to the living quarters to give the rules of the camp, they ask for someone who can translate the German into Italian for the men. The boy's father raises his hand, and runs up front. As the head German soldier barks out orders, he gives in Italian, the proper rules of the game he described to his son -- the first to get a thousand points wins -- asking for snacks gives negative points -- not keeping quiet loses points -- and of course, the prize is a tank. The men all look at him strangely but nobody argues. After the Germans leave he reminds the other men who know German that they must explain to him what was really said.

A few other incidents of the father's antics make the "game" believable to the little boy. Once, he sneaks into a room with a microphone for announcing things over the loadspeaker, and after a few words intended entirely to please his wife who must be listening somewhere, he announces how the game is going, and even lets the boy say hi to his mother. He also convinces the boy that all the children in the camp are in hiding places, and that this is part of the game, when in reality they have been killed. Somehow by luck, the boy is saved from the "showers" (gas chambers, of course) because he hates bathing. After that day the father convinces him that he should hide anytime ANYone comes in the cabin except for him and the other Italians.

The father finds that he knows one of the doctors at the camp, from his waiter days in Italy. His desperate hopes for possible assistance from this man are dashed completely when he realizees the selfish man has no feeling for what the family and other Jews are going through, and that he only wanted to talk to the father about some riddles.

In the end, suddenly one day the war is over and when they return to the cabin in the evening, they find that there is chaos in the compound. There is lots of shooting, yelling and the night is bright with gunfire. The other men in the barracks warn the boy's father that the war is over and the Germans want to get rid of everything, that is, to destroy evidences of the concentration camps. There are huge trucks taking loads of people, and the other men warn, "Try not to get on one, all I know is they keep leaving packed full of people and coming back empty". This time, the man knows they have to hide, and they have to make it through the night, and only that night, in order to survive. Yet he still keeps it a game. He tells his son that this is the last bit, and that today they are going to reach one thousand points if he does everything just as he is told. He tells the boy to hide in a cabinet in the street, while he plans to go and search for his wife. He makes his son swear to never leave the cabinet until it is all quiet and there is nobody around, or until the father returns.

Leaving his son, he goes for a frantic search through the chaos, in the women's quarters, in the trucks taking away the women, looking for his wife. He borrows his son's sweater to put on his head as the women dress with a cloth on the head. While he is searching for her, he is caught unexpectedly in the spotlight of a truck looking for stragglers and runaways like him. Terribly, he is seized. He is led away at gunpoint and walks just past his son, making a clown-like walk to make his son laugh one last time. They take him to a more secluded place and shoot him. It is, of course, both startling and heartbreaking.

The next morning it is quiet, though, and as the son steps out of the cabinet he finds a tank, of a friendly army coming in the gates of the camp. They pick him up and on the ride through the German country, they find his mother walking in the throngs of freed Jews. So those two win, after all.

The important point about this movie is clearly that no matter how bad things can seem, and this is so obviously one of the worst situations one might have to endure, one can find the small, beautiful things in life. One can keep his spirits up. Even in the most torutrous situation one can still be happy and believe that life is beautiful. This man did it for the sake of his son, and because of his nature. That is clear from the first part of the film, where we really get to know him. And in the end, even though he was about to make the ultimate sacrifice after saving his son from all the evil (both in body and mind), he still tried to make his son laugh and feel okay.

The movie IS Italian, and I recommend that for the proper feel you watch it in Italian with subtitles. With such a simple theme, thousands of clever details make this movie shine. It will make you laugh, make you happy deeply at the joyousness of the characters, and bring you a lot of sorrow for the sacrifice that is made, and the suffering that they all endure. It is definitely worth seeing no matter what kind of movies you usually like, because this one is about life and attitude, and everyone can use a lesson in that.