Beautiful, Bold...Brilliant

Rating: 10/10 (30 January 2008)

First of all, a brief summary of the film(without spoiling the plot): Roberto Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish man who moves to Arezzo with his brother. With the help of his humour, some daring and quite a lot of luck, he wins over a Nicoletta Braschi's character, a schoolteacher. Five years later, he and his son are taken to a concentration camp, but his wife successfully manages to persuade the Nazis to let her in too.
La Vita è Bella is on of those rare films that has the quality to make you laugh and to make you cry within its two hour runtime. Its starts as a romantic comedy(with some very funny gags) but ends as a wartime drama; a fact that may send viewers into confusion, but ,personally, I enjoyed it. The fact that it is in Italian didn't put me off at all.
The calibre of the acting is superb, particularly that of Roberto Benigni in the lead role and that of the young child actor, Giorgio Cantarini.
The music compliments the bittersweet tone of the film excellently, as does the contrasting vibrant cinematography at the start and then the dull grey concentration camp at the end.
Overall, a stunning performance from Benigni not just as an actor but as a director and scriptwriter as well. I think that he thoroughly deserved his Best Actor Oscar, and was unlucky to lose in the best director and best script categories. I have not seen Shakespeare in Love, the film which La Vita è Bella lost to in the best picture category, but judging by the standard of this film, I'm not sure whether it deserved it or not.
Having looked at some of the other reviews for this film, I have been shocked to see that many people don't even like it. For those who say it is not a true depiction of the nazi camp, then I say that they are right but this is not meant to be a film just about the harshness of the holocaust, but a film primarily about Roberto Benigni's relationship with his son. The humour I leave up to you, but I personally found it very enjoyable.