Surprised at how much I enjoyed it!

Rating: 10/10 (8 March 2007)

I have to admit that I wasn't looking forward to this film as it was in subtitles and was about such a dark subject but I had heard good things about the film and decided to watch it and I have to say I don't regret it. It was my first subtitle film and once you get used to reading the subtitles on the screen, you soon forget that you are watching a subtitled film.
The first part of the film was bright and breezy with beautiful scenes of Tuscany and Italy. It starts with Guido Orefice played by Roberto Benigni who in 1939, arrives in a large Tuscan village to work as a waiter at a local hotel. He meets Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) there and begins to court her. There are some very funny scenes which happen when he keeps meeting up with her, like her falling on him, him falling on her, then turning up at her school as the School Inspector, only for him to take his clothes off. I found the love story so touching and cheered when Dora finally decided to get rid of the jerk she was engaged to and choose Guido. The scene I most love is when she asks him to get her out of her engagement party and he comes on a green horse that has been vandalised by some unknown person and he rides the horse into the hotel and carries Dora away like a knight in shining armour.
The film moves on to the last year of the war. Guido and Dora are married and have a son. Guido also has his bookshop he wanted when he first came to the town but their lives are changed forever when the Germans invade and send Guido and son Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini) to a concentration camp. Dora follows and demand that she is put on the same train as her husband and child.
This starts the darker and gruesome side to the film. Guido pretends to his son that it is all a game and that they need to score 1,000 points to win a real tank but tells his son that he must keep hidden, not ask for food all the time or he will forfeit his points. There are some horrible scenes, one scene when Guido is bringing his son for a walk and sees the piles of bodies tossed as if they are rubbish and making sure his son can't see the horror before them. Another scene is when Dora and the other woman prisoners are sorting through piles of clothes that have been taken from people who were later gassed. There is a cat there and you flashback to the scene when Guido and his son are travelling to the concentration camp with a little girl stroking her cat and it is shocking that this innocent little girl is killed for something she can't change, and shouldn't have to.
The scenes that tugged at my heart was Guido, somehow getting across the barrier between his wife and himself and telling her how much he loved her, the scene where he plays the music which has some significance for the both of them.
What I wasn't prepared for but which I should have been was when Guido is killed at the end. That is truly a bombshell as you have been with him from the start and watched him survive all the horrors of the camp and keep his son from seeing the true reality that it is almost like your friend dying. I thought it was poignant when he is still keeping up the game with son and he is making a joke out of being lead away and he is still keeping up with the pretence even though he knows when he is being lead to his death.
All the actors are brilliant, Nicoletta Braschi who plays his wife in real life, Giorgio Cantarini, Giustino Durano and Horst Bucholz. Robert Benigni definitely deserved the Oscar for his role and the film definitely deserved the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.