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Life is Still Beautiful to Benigni
by Richard Horgan |
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1/3/2007 at 5:30:43 PM |
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Who can forget the crazy shenanigans of Italian clown Roberto Benigni at the 1997 Academy Awards, when presented with the Best Actor prize by countrywoman Sophia Loren?
Life is Beautiful was only the second feature film produced by Benigni in partnership with his wife Nicoletta Braschi, who together formed the production company Melampo Cinematografica. Now, the formidable couple has returned in limited release with La Tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow), a comedy-drama that first opened in Italy back on October 14th of 2005. In this one, Benigni acts much more like his celebrated Oscar self.
Instead of a concentration camp, the backdrop here is the Iraq war, where poetry professor Attilio (Benigni) must venture to rescue the love of his life, Vittoria (Braschi). If Life is Beautiful was the equivalent of Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and The Kid, then The Tiger and the Snow falls more in line with The Tramp’s early shorts. In other words, flashes of brilliance in an otherwise not-up-to-greatness effort.
As always with Benigni, the story is daringly original (it was awarded a 2006 Silver Ribbon for just that by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists). It underpins those aforementioned flashes, such as the scene where Attilio gets an untimely call on his cell phone while hiding in a bunker hole from Allied troops, or the one where he bemoans the fact of having run out of gas in the middle of an oil-rich desert country.
But unlike the pre-TV world of concentration camps seen in Life is Beautiful, the Iraq war is something we are all directly familiar with, thanks to CNN, YouTube and documentaries like Iraq in Fragments. As a result, Snow’s low-budget portrayal of Baghdad and the war never rings true. (This isn’t helped by the fact that the Iraq of 2005, when the film was made and originally released, is far different from the Iraq of today.) Another problem is the casting of French actor Jean Reno as a prize-winning Arab poet. Morocco born Reno is a great actor, but Arab looking he ain’t.
You’ve still got to love Benigni though. He ends his Director’s Statement in the Snow press notes with the following free form: “I hope this story will indeed surprise, distract, disturb, amuse and move. Perhaps that’s too much to ask for. Never mind. Even if it does just one of the above, that would still be pretty extraordinary for a film.”
For what it’s worth, Mr. Benigni – I was intermittently amused.
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