Remember the Theater of the Absurd?

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 1999)

Roberto Benigni's celebrated affirmation of the human spirit owes a little to "Rhinoceros," Ionesco's absurdist play from the Sixties. There's the same attempt to reduce the worse horror in human history to the absurd. Perhaps this is a way of comprehending something monstrous beyond comprehension. Benigni was criticized in some circles for trivializing the Holocaust, but that is not what he did. He sought to rise above it. I don't know whether he or Ionesco were really successful. On the other hand has anybody--any religion, philosophy or great artist--ever solved the problem of evil in this world?
There's something of Charlie Chaplin in Benigni's irrepressible hero, and in the camera work look for the influence of Orson Wells in light and shadow. The strange splashes of color on such places as the concentration camps walls reminded me curiously of Jacque Demy's "Umbrellas of Cherbourg," a wondrous French operetta from the Sixties (starring Catherine Deneuve, music by Michel Legrand).
The movie drags a little at times and we miss a lot of Benigni's mugging as our eyes chase after the subtitles, but the central idea, that with our attitudes we create the world, and that life can be beautiful even in the midst of tragedy, is uplifting, if hard to believe.
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