The Sadness of The Holocaust With The Combination of The Beauty of Life

The movie separates into two segments. First is classic comedy while other part makes us smile with sadness through the evils of genocide. Benigni plays as the lead role, Guido the waiter in the 1930s Italy. He is also the co-writer and director of the film. Watching his life, we can see the resemblance of Charlie Chaplin. He reaches the city in a jalopy with failed brakes and is mistaken for a coming Fascist notable person, classic comedy. Guido falls in love suddenly with the lovely Dora, who is also Benigni’s wife in real life. He decides to take Dora from the Fascist office worker, her fiancé. By bizarre management of cautiously planned accidents, he makes it look as if he is destined to take place of the Fascist fiancé in Dora’s life.

All the first part of the movie is pure comedy, much of its silent comedy like Chaplin comedy. We learn a key info that Guido is Jewish, this undecidable feature of him is the reason of later events in the movie. Some years passed, Guido and Dora are married and have a 5-year-old son Joshua. In the second part of the movie, the date is 1945, near the end of the world war two, the Jews in the city are gathered by the Nazis and Fascists and shipped by train into a concentration camp. Guido and Joshua are also in this train, and Guido tries to convince his son, turns this sad event into game. He looks like terrified of somehow missing the train and being left out of this game. His wife, who is not Jewish, is spared by the Fascists, but insists on coming along to be with her husband and child.

In the concentration camp, Guido builds a fictional world to comfort and protect his son. He explains that the first team to get a thousand points will win a tank, not a toy tank but a real one, which Joshua can drive all over the city after the game. Guido steps in as the translator for a Nazi soldier who is giving orders, explaining the rules of the camp for the inmates. Guido spontaneously translates the orders into Italian as part of his fictional part, in order to comfort his son.

The film does not necessarily show the real Holocaust, changes it to some extent to make the comicality possible at all. It treats us like children, we do not see any violence, within the real concentration camps there would not be any Guido. Nonetheless the movie is not about Nazism and Fascism, but about the humaneness within oneself. It is about seeing the good in life regardless of where it is lived, devoting himself to good and hopeful. About hoping for a good future for that it will be better for our kids than they are.

Cite this page