Comedy which brings us closer to tragedy

Rating: Null/10 (6 March 1999)

How can we possibly comprehend the horror of the holocaust? Those who have yet to see La Vita e Bella may well deny the appropriateness of using comedy as a means to this end. The very idea strikes one as tasteless and disrespectful.
I can only urge you to watch the film and make your judgement afterwards.
The unique quality of this film is that it appears to conform to all the requirements of classic comedy. Its plot is permitted the contrivances which are comedy's hallmark. We do not question the likelihood of this or that happening because our disbelief is willingly suspended. It as if we are entering a pleasant, if rather tiresome, bourgeois romantic farce.
But as the film develops, we gradually become uneasy as we notice reality running dangerously parallel to comedy. As Guido hurtles down the streets of the town on his bicycle in Chaplinesque fashion, we notice propaganda posters daubing the walls. We have no time to read them, just notice their presence. These darker undertones have intruded slightly on our merriment before, but from now on they will be ever more intrusive.
It is only when the wife returns to her deserted, ransacked home that we are wrenched out of our happy complacency. Through a series of almost imperceptible shifts, we realise that although the comic form of the film is being maintained, we are actually being confronted with a tragedy of almost incomprehensible horror. We realise that Benigni is using comedy to throw the impending tragedy of the story into unbearably sharp relief. The caricature is simply a mask through which we perceive heroism and resourcefulness engendered by love.
Inevitably, Benigni's treatment of the holocaust will be compared to Spielberg's. The problem with Schindler's List is that its laudable aim of presenting the reality of the holocaust with chilling accuracy leaves us, the audience, as horrified onlookers. We become voyeurs, the lucky ones whose lives have been untouched by such terror. We look on aghast but we cannot really imagine the experience as our experience. The more sickening the representation of cruelty becomes, the more removed we are from what is being enacted in front of us.
Violence in this film is only alluded to. Even the most shocking act of violence we are personally confronted with is masked from our view. We see Guido being frog marched through the camp to certain death. To the very end he maintains his act of convincing his child that reality is make-believe. Even this last summons becomes part of the elaborate game, requiring him to subordinate his own personal anguish and terror in order to protect his child.
And then he disappers behind a wall and we hear the shots. Nothing more than that. For a moment, the comic form of the film almost leads us to believe that we will see him poking his head round the corner and giving as a cheeky grin. But there is nothing, just an eerie, unendurable silence, until finally, the executioner comes back into view as he returns to carry on with his duties. It is at this moment Benigni conveys us to us an elemental truth about the holocaust which has hitherto alluded those of us who were untouched by it. For it is here that the film is stripped of any comic artifice. Strangely, though, we witness this incident almost emotionlessly. We cannot believe it has happened. This funny man is a survivor, he always pulls through, it is his function in the film to survive. And suddenly we are exposed to the utterly devastating realisation that he hasn't. The comedy has lulled us into a false sense of security. We have been cheated, and we are truly bereaved.
In a sense, the comic form of the film is not dissimilar to the father's treatment of his son. Except that, as adults, we are expected understand Benigni's use of his form, invited to see through the comic charade in a way the child must not. But at the same time, it is his very use of comedy which allows him to hold us back, albeit ever so slightly, from the uncompromising cruelty of the holocaust - until, that is, those shots are fired and we grasp their meaning - not with tears and emotion but almost as something hard and tangible. A man dies with no more ceremony or dignity than we might swat a fly.
A distillation of all that is abhorrent in man's inhumanity to man is contained in that silence.
The need, however, to make sense of human suffering and loss is satisfied in this film when the child survives his ordeal both emotionally and physically. Of course, the comic form of the film requires a happy ending and that is achieved as soon as the American tank rumbles towards the jubilant boy whose patient, credulous innocence has allowed both him and Guido to win their respective prizes. There is nothing gratuitous here, however, nor in the reunion of mother and child. The happy ending has been bought at an incalculable cost.
Of course our emotions are overwhelmed in these closing scenes. If we fail to be moved by the triumph of love over adversity, we must surely acknowledge something lacking in us. Earlier in the film, our tears well up to the strains of the Barcerole directed across the bleak prison courtyard, to the Guido's impromptu broadcast over the PA system, to the sight of a mother choosing to board a train which will take her to the death camps. It matters not that these incidents are unrealistic; in the context of the drama, they ring perfectly true as they symbolise the irrepressible force of love.
It is relatively easy to document the horror of the holocaust, quite another to express the truth of it meaningfully. It is, by definition, unspeakable. But whilst words might fail us, Benigni's film helps us feel it. He achieves his aim through art and deliberate artifice.