Life is Beautiful Essay Example

Life is Beautiful Essay Life Is Beautiful, explores the power of laughter to lift the human spirit even in the face of extreme tragedy.Director, Roberto Benigni is able to do this buy taking a fairy tale approach that is both funny and moving but with an unusual shift in tone midway through the film.Benigni who plays Guido in the film using humor to deflect criticism and confuse his enemies and watching his adventures, we are reminded of Charlie Chaplin (Ebert, 1).Now lets take a deeper look in to Benignis fairy tale approach in Life is Beautiful. Set in Italy in 1939, amid a climate of growing anti-Semitism and fascism in the town of Arezzo, a city south of Florence, Tuscany, in 1939 (M. Aste, 11).Guido is an enchanting Jewish waiter with a fantastic imagination.Guido instantly falls for Dora(Nicoletta Braschi), a beautiful schoolteacher from a prominent family whos inconveniently engaged to a powerful fascist town clerk.Guido becomes undeclared rival with Doras fianc.Also at the beginning of this film Gu ido makes friends with a German doctor (Horst Buchholz) who is a regular guest at the hotel and shares his love of riddles. In thisfirst half of the film, magic gives Guido a chance to win Doras.In town, Guido survives by quick improvisation.Guido by the fantastic manipulation of carefully planned coincidences, he makes it appear that he is fated to replace the dour Fascist in Doras life.Mistaken for a school inspector, Guido invests a quick lecture on Italian superiority, demonstrating the excellence of his big ears and superb navel to impress Dora. All of this early material, thefirst act of the film, is comedy- much of it silent comedy involving the fate of a much traveled hat (Ebert, 1).Only well into the film do we even learn the crucial information that Guido is Jewish which I think is done to show people that love can exist no matter w