Roberto Benigni
La Vita E' Bella

"Life is Beautiful"

Take an immense tragedy, the greatest of the 20th century, keep it in the background as much as you can, and until that moment, prepare to tell it by sprinkling bits of humor here and there that will serve you well in the end, when it's time to show it in all its atrocity, when it will be time to gather tears. Find a title for your work, the easiest and most childish title there is, like "life is beautiful," and present it just in time for Christmas. Once you've shaken Italy, once you've secured the blessing of Europeans and the Jewish community, set off to conquer the USA, where Jews truly matter, especially in cinema. And perhaps you'll win an Oscar.

As a young man, I always loved Benigni, his irreverence, his being always out of place, his light manner of desecrating places and sacred monsters wherever he made an entrance. My relationship with him became strained after the film with Troisi: there I understood who and what a comedian was, there I realized the Neapolitan played by instinct, while the Tuscan 'reasoned.' Unpacking "Nothing Left to Do but Cry" into its scenes, the ones that truly make you laugh, those memorable are Troisi's inventions, they all have the Neapolitan accent. Benigni – forced by the other's overwhelming presence on the scene, 'live' – reluctantly assumes the role of older brother, limiting himself to a dignified sidekick, continually bringing Massimo back to the realm of rationality, on the prescribed tracks of the plot from which the other perpetually escaped. A rationalizing comedian, therefore, intelligent to the highest levels, but cold, calculating, hypocritical.

And "Life is Beautiful" is his acme, the masterpiece of cinematic and artistic hypocrisy, where every trait of the script, every line, every whim is subordinated to begging for the viewer's pity. The overly abused mechanism of a joke that takes complete form two scenes later. The film is stuffed with it, see the one with the hat under her house. It is the paradigm of a never spontaneous comedy, but always channeled to achieve the preordained effect: the dictionary says 'to appease.' All this is bearable in little films like "The Little Devil" or "The Monster," but here the same lowly tricks were used within a context where you can't just pretend to enter with your hat on to see the effect it has because the church, this time, is 'too sacred.'

Juxtaposing tragedy with comedy is a sublime art, one must be reckless even to consider doing it; the Mozartian Don Giovanni is there for this, as an absolute. A true reckless person would have profaned even the Holocaust, would have entered the church naked, leaving us intact all the strength of the tragedy and without asking for our tears, without aiming for the goodwill of Hollywood's Jews. Doing it the way Benigni did is an abomination. And "Life is Beautiful" is just that.