Life is Beautiful

The first time I saw Life is Beautiful I was shaken to my core. My friend Mary had invited me to go to a movie as she often did. We were homeschooling partners. She lives down the street and would take my son for a lesson or project and then I'd take hers. Our lives revolved around our families. I had a new baby boy. She had told me the premise of the movie at one time but I'd completely forgotten. I sat down and began to watch a love story, a sweet funny man, Guido an Italian Jew, who had come across the sweet shy woman of his dreams and he was determined to win her heart. It was Italy in the 1930s just before the German occupation and life was beautiful.

Guido wins the heart of his Italian lady who he calls "princepessa," princess. They have a beautiful little son and their life is beautiful until the movie takes a nightmarish turn and the Germans take the father and son. Princepessa insists to be taken with them. My heart began to break.

It was their son's 4th birthday and Guido, refusing to relinquish life's beauty, tells his son they are playing a game to celebrate. At every step of their unthinkable journey Guido remains bouyant, encouraging his son with his imaginative game to be the same. The crowded train ride was torturous. The boy wanted to go home and sleep in his own bed. For me this was an excrutiating scene. The simplicity of life and comfort, gone. A child needs a bed to rest his weary, confused body. At the camp, Princepessa is separated from the two and Guido continues his game telling the boy that they are participating in a contest, the winner of which would win a tank in the end. He lifts the spirits of his boy who he keeps hidden from the guards with his game throughout their days in the camp.

In the weeks following my viewing of this movie that bruised my heart with unthinkable pain and joy I would be shocked again hearing people speaking out against it. They said that Roberto Benini made light of one of the worst evils this planet has ever seen. No, it was the exact opposite. His movie was somehow able to introduce to me in a new way the horror of it all by holding fast to the beauty of life despite that horror. By showing the one that refused to go down with the ship, I could see more clearly the catastrophic evil that pulled millions of people, the Germans included, under to the destruction of their lives.

To know parenthood and the desperate consuming love and appreciation of life discovered there from the moment of conception is to know the immense tragedy of ignoring it.