Beauty of Life

Link:  Life is Beautiful (film). Can be watched on Netflix and is also available in the mulitmedia center. 

           Life is Beautiful is a film set in Italy during WWII. The film takes the audience through sad, but triumphal journey of Guido Orefice and his family as they are forced to reside in a concentration camp. There are several of connections between the film and Dante’s Divine Comedy, the first one being connection between the main character and Guido Calvacanti. Guido Orefice is a poet who came from Arezzo, Italy before being forced into the camp. Guido Calvacanti was also a poet during the time of Dante.

            The bigger connection lies within the film’s genre and the title of Dante’s epic. Comedy, as most of modern society knows it as, is a genre that highlights on comic performances or literature that evokes laughter among the audience. However, for Dante, he takes on the more ancient Greek and Roman definition of comedy, which is stage-plays that have happy endings. In the time of Dante, this definition was furthered by including comedies as long narrative poems with happy endings. In Inferno, Dante and Virgil talk about their different styles of writing, where Virgil tragedies that are serious and Dante writes comedies. Dante goes on to tell Virgil that although Dante writes comedies, his comedies are very serious and not necessarily happy. Dante adds that tragedies can also end in good things, which alludes to the ancient Greek and Roman definition of comedy.

            In the film, Guido is a Italian Jew who is taken away to the concentration camp with his very young son, Joshua. Because Joshua still had that childlike innocence in him, Guido did not want that to be taken away, despite everything else that was taken from him. What Guido did was trick his son into believing that they were being taken away to play a game. He told Joshua that in order to win this game, he had to hide from the German soldiers (since the rest of the Jewish children were incinerated) and be completely silence. His father tells him that the first prize is a real tank (Joshua’s love) and Joshua fervently obeyed. Joshua had no idea of what was really going on. His father was beaten and put to work daily, while some prisoners died in the process, yet Joshua had no idea. To Joshua, everything was fine and part of this game. This was the serious part of the film, the tragic life (Joshua was oblivious too) of Jewish individuals during WWII in fascist Italy. But throughout the film, there are comic reliefs that take the audience away from the tragedy, which Dante does incorporate in his Divine Comedie. Dante ends his Comedie on a more positive note to teach his audience something important and Guido Orefice tugs on that element as the audience sees at the end of the film. Although a German solider executed Guido during the camp’s riot, Joshua is reunited with his mother after Joshua spotted on her while he was riding in an American (one of the Allies) tank. He shouts, “We won,” because in his mind, he got the prize, the tank. But what Guido did for Joshua was show him that even amongst tragedy, Life can still be beautiful. This was not the same as Dante’s message, but theme is the same. Comedy can be serious as well because it can help show that even at the end of a tragedy, good can still emerge.