Top 100 Movies you must Watch... 45- Life Is Beautiful

1997 Film

8.5/10-IMDb

4.6/5-Amazon.com

80%-Rotten Tomatoes

Release date: October 23, 1998 (USA)

Director: Roberto Benigni

Music composed by: Nicola Piovani

Awards: Academy Award for Best Actor, Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Academy Award for Original Music Score, César Award for Best Foreign Film, David di Donatello for Best Film, BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, European Film Award for Best Film, David di Donatello for Best Actor, Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, David di Donatello for Best Director, European Film Award for Best Actor, Nastro d'Argento for Best Actor, David di Donatello for Best Screenplay, Nastro d'Argento for Best Director, Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Language Film, David di Donatello for Best Producer, Goya Award for Best European Film, Funniest Actor In A Motion Picture (Leading Role), Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award for Best Actor,German Film Award for Best Foreign Film, David di Donatello for Best Cinematography, Lumiere Award for Best Foreign Film, Robert Award for Best Non-American Film, San Diego Film Critics Society Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Chlotrudis Award for Best Director, Kansas City Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Florida Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film, Blue Ribbon Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Nastro d'Argento Best Screenplay, French Syndicate of Cinema Critics Award for Best Foreign Film, Nastro d'Argento Best Supporting Actor, David di Donatello for Best Production Design, National Board of Review for Special Achievement in Filmmaking,Cannes Grand Prize of the Jury, David di Donatello Scholars Jury Award,Online Film Critics Society Award for Best Foreign Language Film,Cinema Writers Circle Awards (Spain) for Best Foreign Film, Australian Film Institute Award for Best Foreign Film, Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award for Best Director, Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Language Film, David Di Donatello for Best Costume Design, Southeastern Film Critics Association Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award for Best Foreign Film, Nastro d'Argento Best Original Story

Description

In 1939 Italy, Guido Orefice is a funny and charismatic young Jewish man looking for work in a city. He falls in love with a local school teacher, Dora, who is to be engaged to a rich but arrogant civil servant. Guido engineers further meetings with her, seizing on coincidental incidents to declare his affection for her, and finally wins her over. He steals her from her engagement party on a horse, humiliating her fiance and mother. Soon they are married and have a son, Joshua.

Through the first part, the film depicts the changing political climate in Italy: Guido frequently imitates members of the National Fascist Party, skewering their racist logic and pseudoscientific reasoning (at one point, jumping onto a table to demonstrate his "perfect Aryan bellybutton"). However, the growing Fascist wave is also evident: the horse Guido steals Dora away on has been painted green and covered in antisemitic insults.

Later during World War II, after Dora and her mother have reconciled, Guido, his Uncle Eliseo and Joshua are seized on Joshua's birthday, forced onto a train and taken to a concentration camp. Despite being a non-Jew, Dora demands to be on the same train to join her family. In the camp, Guido hides their true situation from his son, convincing him that the camp is a complicated game in which Joshua must perform the tasks Guido gives him, earning him points; the first team to reach one thousand points will win a tank. He tells him that if he cries, complains that he wants his mother, or says that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn extra points.

Guido uses this game to explain features of the concentration camp that would otherwise be scary for a young child: the guards are mean only because they want the tank for themselves; the dwindling numbers of children (who are being killed by the camp guards) are only hiding in order to score more points than Joshua so they can win the game. He puts off Joshua's requests to end the game and return home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank, and need only wait a short while before they can return home with their tank. Despite being surrounded by the misery, sickness, and death at the camp, Joshua does not question this fiction because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence.

Guido maintains this story right until the end when, in the chaos of shutting down the camp as the Americans approach, he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final competition before the tank is his. Guido tries to find Dora, but is caught by a soldier. As he is marched off to be executed, he maintains the fiction of the game by deliberately marching in an exaggerated goose-step as he passes Joshua's hiding place.

The next morning, Joshua emerges from the sweatbox as the camp is occupied by an American armored division; he thinks he has won the game. The soldiers let him ride in the tank until, later that day, he sees Dora in the crowd of people streaming home from the camp. In the film, Joshua is a young boy; however, both the beginning and ending of the film are narrated by an older Joshua recalling his father's story of sacrifice for his family.

. Wikipedia

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