Just another love story

Rating: 3/10 (25 November 1999)

Making people laugh about Concentration camp is a courageous if dangerous endeavor, especially as a wave of neo-Nazism sweeps over Europe. Laughing is a serious matter, however, as Begnini seems to believe, and why could it not make us discover new aspect of the Nazi horror? Well it could but in the case of Begninis's film it does not. The film is less a film on concentration camps than another love story, of a man and a woman and of a father and his son. The Holocaust is turned into a banal jail the Jews project (I particularly resented the depicting nearly every prisoner as Italian speaking, in itself a highly unrealistic assumption) to serve a melodramatic story. Italy has produced with Primo Levi's self-biographical book If This is a Man one the strongest account of life in Nazi's concentration camp to date. Begnini's film is indeed an insult to Levi´s masterwork. Read Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale comic strip on the subject instead.