Tim Woodcock reviews a film which sees humour in the Holocaust, makes a Nazi concentration camp look like Butlins... and finds untruths which set its victims free
Life is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella), directed by Roberto Benigni (Melampo Cinematografica), on general release.
From the moment of its release Life is Beautiful was dogged by an intense uneasiness. The idea of coming to terms with the Holocaust by pretending it was something else, just an elaborate game, is bound to offend sensibilities.
But this film is neither a sensationalist account of genocide nor a denial of history. It is something more.
The first hour is a charming, knockabout love story. Guido is a guileless chancer who wins his princess; they have the cutest son since Toto in Cinema Paradiso. I’d come to see a heavyweight Holocaust film and was being treated to this fluff! Then in the middle (almost, but not entirely, without warning) fascism kicks in. Guido had been able to walk past shop signs that said “No dogs or Jews” and tell his son Giosue, “When we have our own shop we’ll put ‘no giraffes or Russians’”. A flippant yet smart response - but one that seems increasingly inadequate as discrimination becomes extermination.
Guido continues to make up stories to protect his son and explain the strange days that he and his family are living through. You get points for playing by the Nazis’ rules, Guido explains. The first to reach 1000 point wins a tank.
At times it is very funny. But Guido’s fictions are for me highly problematic: a snowball of benevolent lies, an irresponsible and evasive solution. The relationship between father and child is unlikely, but not unbelievable. What did not convince was the relationship with the other men in the dormitory/battery farm. Surely at least some of them would lose patience with the farcical games and demand that Guido tell his son the truth. I, perhaps, would have been one of those. Guido’s imposition of a magical alternative world onto a living hell is calculated to keep his son safe. Unfortunately, Guido doesn’t understand everything. It is truly agonising, in the context of the holocaust, to hear a father encourage his son to “go take a shower”.
Giosue senses this is not a game: games are fun and they don’t last this long. Yet somehow he is persuaded that he must keep playing: as more and more of the children disappear, the other hide-and-seek element becomes more critical.
We are well-used to this idea of making our own reality - pick whichever truths work for you. But this is something we associate with having an excessive number of choices, not a degrading end-game. I longed for the conventional categories of truth/falsehood and good/evil to be re-established. Tell him The Truth! Let him understand!
We might be tempted to dismiss the concentration-camp-as-eccentric-holiday-camp interpretation as “mere fantasy” but for the fact that the tank really does appear at the end: Giosue has behaved in the right way, so he wins his reward. A square-jawed American GI arrives in a tank and reunites Giosue with his mother. The tank provides closure and brings the magic sub-world and the harsh real world together. So did Giosue clock up 1000 points and bring about the end of the game? Or did the Germans surrender and the war end?
If Benigni were a less competent filmmaker/actor you might argue that he is using the Holocaust as metaphor, to demonstrate in a banal way that the human spirit can triumph in adverse circumstances. But this audacious film plays with much more interesting ideas.
To call history a construct, governed by arbitrary interpretations and selections, is no longer controversial; “good” and “evil” are terms we would rather do without; yet, at the same time, the one great lesson of twentieth century Europe is the Holocaust. It is not something one would like to see relegated to “an interpretation” of rumoured events.
Despite a handful of Holocaust-deniers, in most circles it has a special unchallengeable status.
Life is Beautiful courageously pushes the genocide to the background. Numbers of victims and reasons for victimhood are left out. It concentrates on a micro-tragedy. It is such an unconventional approach that it feels like traditional Holocaust imagery is being challenged from “within”. Benigni employs slapstick rather than satire. Perhaps the taboo is to show a larger-than-life character when one would prefer to feel pity for a mere shadow of a person.
I return to my initial question: can humour and the holocaust go together?
They can. To say that holocaust victims don’t laugh is like asserting that “white men can’t jump” - okay, it’s not a strength but it is not an impossibility either. There are glorious moments of victory-in-defeat: most movingly, perhaps, when Guido risks playing a favourite record to his wife over the tannoy as a defiant act of love. Mostly, however, the unexpected happens: encountering a heap of corpses is an aesthetic moment; the German doctor who looks like he might help is a self-absorbed shit. It is the untruths that set Giosue free.
Tim Woodcock edits “Movement”, the magazine of the Student Christian Movement.