Triumph of the human spirit.

Rating: Null/10 (19 May 2004)

I take on board the criticisms of this movie by those who think it trivialises the Holocaust, but I think it is necessary to interpret it in different terms entirely. The reality of the Nazi death camps is not portrayed here; it would be impossible to do so in a comedy.
Instead, we are given a sketchy idea of what life was like in that terrible situation and the movie focuses on the efforts of one man to survive and protect his son from the horror. It is a very light-hearted Italian view but maybe it makes a contribution as an alternative to more serious heart-rending accounts of the Nazi atrocities. Of course disbelief must be suspended if we are to be convinced that an intelligent child could avoid the reality of his situation, but I felt that the boy was playing along with his father, even though he somehow knew what danger he was in. I found myself wondering what the goal of the film was, and it wasn't to trivialise the most intense human suffering but offer an alternative response to it, and show a different type of courage. We can go through life weeping over the suffering in the world, which is all around us and hard to escape, or we can choose to concentrate on the good in other people and use that as a power to change things. Optimism is not necessarily self-delusion, sometimes it is the only thing between us and insanity.