Benign Benigni

La Vita E Bella/Life Is Beautiful (12) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

The comic brilliance of the Chaplinesque Italian actor, writer and director, Roberto Benigni, as evinced by such uproariously funny farces as Johnny Stecchino and The Monster, has long been denied Irish cinema-goers. Now - finally - there is an opportunity for audiences here to savour this rich talent with the release of Benigni's finest film to date, La Vita E Bella. In this tour de force for his remarkable physical style of comedy, Benigni plays the first half of the film entirely for laughs before switching to pathos and the humour of desperation in the second half.

The setting is 1939, in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, where the voluble and seriously accident-prone Guido Orefice (played by Benigni) arrives with a poet-upholsterer friend and the dream of opening a bookshop. Benigni's wife and regular co-star, Nicoletta Braschi, plays the schoolteacher for whom he falls when he crashes into her on his bike, landing on top of her on the street.

The zany slapstick comedy which permeates the movie's first half is expertly executed and played with terrific panache by Benigni. As a background to all this humour are ominous signs of the growth of anti-Semitism as the second World War breaks out, and the film's second half is set five years later when Guido, who is Jewish, is sent to a concentration camp with his young son, Joshua, played by the wonderfully natural Giorgio Cantarini.

The humour of the second half resides in Guido's elaborate attempts to save his son from the gas chambers and to shield him from the reality of their plight by pretending that it's all a game with a prize at the end. While the abrupt switch in tone and mood never entirely gels, the movie falters only briefly before the second half takes on an emotional power of its own.

Benigni takes an enormous risk by daring to treat the Holocaust in such initially unlikely terms. Yet there is a certain logic in his appliance of the acute sense of the absurd which permeates the first half of the film to the concentration camp setting of the second - a milieu which utterly defied rational thought in its outrageous scheme of mass extermination. The result is a superb film which proves as genuinely moving as it is deliriously funny; such achievements are rare in contemporary cinema.