A triumph of the will?

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The impact of the Holocaust on modern history has been profound. From the end of the Second World War until today, its spectre has loomed large in our cultural inheritance. And since Orson Welles's The Stranger (1946), films have played an important part in this. In the last twenty years, for instance, no fewer than 85 films have been released worldwide with the Holocaust as their theme, including Schindler's List (1993), The Pianist (2002) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008). These films have grappled with the questions of motives and ideology of the Nazi government and have brought us to weeping at the brutal treatment of humans by other humans. They plead with us never to forget that this tragedy was a deliberate act; and that it must not be repeated.

Life is Beautiful offers something different. There is no denial of the horror or suffering of the Holocaust, as some of the film's critics have argued, but at the same time these themes are simply not the film's focus. Instead it draws our attention to the strength of love and the lengths to which love will go when faced with such extreme and distressing circumstances. Its treatment of these themes, however, will be more familiar to fans of Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) than the audiences of Schindler's List. Its Italian writer, director and lead actor is Roberto Benigni, who built his reputation on films like The Monster (1994) and is renowned in Italy for his improvised slapstick comedy. You may be able to see why Life is Beautiful has attracted criticism – slapstick laughs in a Holocaust film? – but the humour in this film is not for entertainment. It makes a profound point about the way humans may react in the most adverse circumstances, and how we protect our internal life when our external world is so bleak.

The film opens in 1939 in Arezzo, a small and tranquil town in Tuscany. Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni) and his friend Ferruccio (Sergio Bustric), have come to find work in the tough economic climate, but as soon as he arrives, Guido has his eye on something else. Or to be more precise, someone else. This is his principessa (princess), Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whose heart he sets out to win. The first half of this fable is devoted to Guido's efforts to gain her affections by various means. We quickly discover, though, that he has a rival for Dora in the form of the ambitious bureaucrat Senior Rodolfo (Amergio Fontani). This is a man on close terms with the town's prefetto (prefect) and with connections to the government in Rome. But Guido's chances seems promising, because he and Dora keep bumping into each other: she falls into his arms from a first-storey window, he collides with her while escaping from Senior Rodolfo (whom he had accidentally attacked with a flower pot), and he even turned up at her school, impersonating the expected inspector (wearing his sash more jauntily than the genuine official). Some might have found Guido's persistent comic efforts irritating, but Dora is charmed.

Ferruccio is the inspiration for Guido's most unusual method for winning Dora. One night, when Guido asks his friend how he manages to get to sleep despite Guido doing his best to keep him awake, Ferruccio answers that it's Schopenhauer. He elaborates: Schopenhauer said, ‘I am what I want to be’. In other words, it's a question of will power. In fact, Schopenhauer's philosophy understood the will to be a universal, blind force, rather than what we might consider as the strength of willpower of an individual. The will is a ‘will to life’ or a ‘will to live’. We might see this as a desire to survive, and it is in this sense that Schopenhauer's philosophy is a guiding force behind Life is Beautiful. Yet we never hear Guido openly espousing this philosophy, and Benigni seems to have seized the chance to use his character to poke fun. When Guido sets about using his strong willpower to win over Dora, we're treated to much waving of fingers in the style of a magician of a children's party. Whether it's the strength of Guido's willpower or the charm he weaves, he succeeds in winning Dora from Rodolfo, whisking her away from him at no less than their engagement party.

They escape on the back of a horse belonging to Guido's uncle, Eliseo (Guistino Durano). It has been defaced and marked as a ‘Jewish Horse’. There are more hints of the increasing tolerance of this society for Nazi ideas – around the table at the party some guests discuss the complex maths problems children are asked to perform in Germany, asking about the savings if no healthcare was provided to the disabled. They're outraged, but not at the content – the maths is too hard. At this point we have little idea how these comments will come to affect Guido and Dora, but as the second half of the film opens, modern-day viewers will be able to anticipate the chilling turn of events.

Just after Guido and Dora have escaped to begin their life together, we cut to some years later. They now have a young son, Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini), and Guido has opened a bookshop. Perhaps life is now beautiful? The town is very different now, though. There is an obvious military presence, and a marked hostility towards Jewish people. The restaurants are marked, ‘No Jews allowed’. Giosué asks his father why this is, and he replies that it's their choice, without revealing the real reason. Guido's shop has also been branded ‘Jewish Shop’, and he's selling all his books at half price, presumably because the authorities' anti-Jewish actions are putting him out of business. Then one day, Giosué's birthday, Dora arrives home to find that her husband and son have been taken by the authorities. She demands to be taken with them.

As Guido and his young son board the train, Giosué begins to question him about where they're going. Whether Guido had planned this strategy in advance or not is never made clear, but he begins to protect his son from the truth. He explains that it's part of his birthday treat, that they're going to be part of a game. The winner of the game will win a prize: a tank (an extremely attractive gift for Giosué), but the stakes are high, in several senses. They must score 1,000 points to win the game, and points are scored by being well behaved and keeping out of sight. Guido's primary desire here is to protect his son, both from the awful consequences of attracting the attention of the German guards and from the horror of the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is at this point that the counterpart to the will in Schopenhauer's philosophy comes into play. This is something he called the representation, that is, the way the world appears to us. Guido protects his son by creating for him a different representation of the events of the concentration camp, and pretends it is a game.

This is the most shocking aspect of the film. Faced with the daily abuse of the camp guards, we watch Guido trying to make it appear fun so that Giosué isn't scared. One scene brings this across poignantly. It takes place just after they have arrived at the camp. The German guard comes to explain the rules, and asks if any prisoner can speak German, in order to translate them for the other prisoners. Guido cannot, but he raises his hand. He pretends to translate what the guard is saying, for Giosué's benefit. The scene would be funny in any other context, but in the grim setting of the concentration camp it serves to underline the horror of their situation. Although Guido may not understand German, Benigni does, and this makes one of Guido's translations revealing. The guard says, ‘You are a number; you are a slave; you are subhuman.’ Guido translates these words as, ‘You are at play; we work for you; you are, ultimately, winners.’ This gives us an important insight into how Benigni's character is facing his suffering. He is faced with an unimaginably awful situation, but his response is to shield his son from the extent of the horror by pretending it's not there, to demonstrate his love for his son by declaring them, ultimately, to be the winners. The one thing the guards cannot take away is how he chooses to see his situation.

But it is not exactly hope that Guido has. He never comforts Giosué by saying that one day these things will pass. Perhaps he cannot promise that much. Instead, he hides the entire reality of their plight from his son, and Giosué seems not to doubt his father's words. He comes close to being unsure that the camp really is a game on one occasion in particular. Giosué comes to Guido frightened, because he has overheard rumours from some of the other men that they will be turned into buttons and soap, that they will be burned in ovens. His father makes a joke out of the very idea, but his humour has a deadly reality that viewers should know from history. This is a strong argument against the idea that Life is Beautiful trivialises the Holocaust. Every attempt Guido makes to try and make the camp seem fun for Giosué only emphasises for us the grim inhumanity of their circumstances. All the same, the film does not focus on the circumstances themselves, but rather on Guido's way of coping with them. In a strange amalgam of the two halves of Schopenhauer's philosophy outlined above, his representation to himself of his situation abandons reality altogether in order to keep living.

There is much power in this approach, particularly when Guido is prepared to sacrifice so much personally in order to protect Giosué and Dora (performing silly walks in front of the guards, hijacking the radio to communicate with his wife). But we might wonder whether Guido's strength of character is entirely realistic. Viktor Frankl, Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, observed that when prisoners could no longer see a future for themselves they simply gave up. He wrote, ‘With this loss of belief in the future,’ these people ‘also lost [their] spiritual hold.’[1] In other words, they had no hope, so they lost their hold on themselves. Frankl went on to found a school of psychotherapy based on this premise, that the search for meaning will sustain people. For those in the Holocaust, their meaning was that they were more than the number and the work assigned to them by the guards; each of them was a personality that the guards could never extinguish. But where Guido faces his situation by denial, for Frankl it is a belief in a better future which sustains us through suffering.

We find a similar approach to Frankl's in the Bible. In one well-known Psalm, King David writes, ‘though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil’ (Psalm 23:4, NIV). He's talking about his confidence in the Lord, the God of the Bible. It's not that God has removed him from his situation of suffering, though. God comforts him and takes away any fear he has, at least in the immediate moment. The Psalm ends with these words: ‘I will live in the house of the Lord forever.’ (Psalm 23:6). Here David is looking forward to a time in the future, when he will be living with God. This is the Bible's image of a new creation, and this is the future hope that sustains David in his time of suffering. None of us are likely to have experienced the depths of inhuman treatment suffered by those in concentration camps during the Second World War, but all of us look to a hope for the future. In contrast, Schopenhauer's philosophy leads to the kind of denial that Guido adopts, and though this works in fiction, as Frankl noted, in reality our hope is what sustains us. For Christians, hope is trust in a God who cannot break his promises.

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