If you go to the cinema once a year, this is certainly the film to see this year! Simply UNMISSABLE!

Rating: 9/10 (5 March 1999)

Doesn't it feel good to be treated by European cinema with delicacies like this? What an absolute pleasure such films fill your soul with, it feels so nice not to have been cheated by producers who promise heavenly films and deliver nonsense.
Benigni is not new in cinema and filming, having directed and written before (e.g. Il Piccolo diavolo (1988) aka The Little Devil (1988)), but it is mainly his comedy he is known of, his characters being utterly silly (on purpose ?) but always satirical and extreme, outspoken and laughable, as well as lovable. Just recall the taxi-driver in Rome in Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991) or The Little Devil (1988) himself.
Yet Benigni never managed to overcome the superficial comedy, the lighthearted one, which was keeping him in the general entertainer level, a kind of clown for the masses. In this rhapsody to life though he steps far ahead, he becomes the advocate of happiness, simplicity, love. He radiates his Italian/Mediterranean spirit of loudly spoken, open-hearted, joyful mood, even in his miserable times he has his own unique way to deliver an open smile.
Benigni chose to work on a tough subject, the holocaust, but his intention is not to present his version of the subject, produce another Schindler's List. The holocaust is only his vehicle to express his anti-racist, anti-fascist ideas and bind them up in an all-loving manifesto on enjoying life no matter how it comes. His story starts when his character Guido tries the urbanised way of living in a late 1930's Italian town affected by the rise in popularity of the fascist ideas. Guido remains unaffected by the dark signs and worries not, always finding a way to make things seem funny, satirising every aspect of a strict and collapsing state and public life. He falls in love with the school teacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real life wife, who has worked with him in almost all his other films), whose heart he wins through a series of hilarious incidents. The camera meets them again after a few years, married and with a son. They get sent to a concentration camp, but Guido will find again a way to make things seem glad to his little boy's eyes.
It's pointless for me to go through the nominations and awards the film has earned (and is going to earn !!!), look at the imdb's website for this. Still, it is the audience which gives the credits to the film, and it was a nice feeling for me to see so content faces when the lights turned on in the theatre I saw the film. Some might accuse Benigni of dealing with a sorrowing matter in a light way. But if you ask me, unlike Spielberg and other directors who narrated stories about the holocaust, Benigni succeeded exorcising it without putting even a single brutality on celluloid, merely telling his audience that life is what you experience and every single one of us has a different perception of reality. If you go to the cinema once a year, this is certainly the film to see this year! Simply UNMISSABLE! It deserves a 9 out of 10.