I saw one movie this weekend called "Life is Beautiful". Heard a lot about this movie from my wife. Laughing in the face of adversity is the best way to triumph over it. This is a sentiment I share with Roberto Benigni, director of Life is Beautiful (La Vita รจ Bella) the only movie to ever make me laugh out loud and leave me with sad tears in my eyes.
The film has two parts to it. In the first part Benigni, who plays Guido, a waiter working for his uncle who owns a hotel in Italy. He keeps bumping into Dora. By staging an elaborate (and humorous!) series of events Guido rescues Dora from marrying the town clerk. Life appears to be going fairly well for Guido even though Mussolini has just signed a pact with Hitler to implement his Nazi policies with regards to Jews.
Flash forward five years later and we see Guido owning a bookstore he manages with his wife and son. It's almost the end of World War II, but that makes the position of Jewish-Italians all the more precipitous. One day, the Germans come to take away Guido and his son. His wife, not being Jewish, chooses to go along.
Right from the start, Guido takes a huge risk by treating the whole exercise as a joke. He explains to his son that they've just bought tickets to take part in a contest to win a tank and humorous explanation for the happenings around and to them in the German concentration camp.
The emotional ending (Where Guido dies in order to save his son in the German concentration camp) is all the more powerful because up till the end, we do not know what is really going to happen. This is the kind of a movie I've waited for a long time to be made and in my view deserved the Oscars for all the categories it was nominated for but didn't win.
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