Film Review:
Life Is Beautiful; You've Got Mail; The Shop Around The Corner

by Rob Gowland

The Italian film Life Is Beautiful (La Vita E Bella) has won a host 
of international awards, from the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film 
Festival to the Best Jewish Experience Award at last year's Jerusalem Film 
Festival.

It is not just a critical success, however. It has also come first in 
audience polls, for instance at both the Montreal and Toronto Film 
Festivals. Not a bad achievement for a comedy, half of which is set in a 
concentration camp!

The film is written and directed by the dynamic comic Roberto Benigni, who 
also stars in it. Benigni is internationally known for Johnny 
Stecchino and Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law.

Benigni is one of Italy's best known politically committed left-wing 
filmmakers and in Life Is Beautiful he has taken as his theme the 
power of comedy — to defy injustice, to expose stupidity, to 
protect the innocent — and the courageous sacrifice a particular man makes 
to give his wife and son love and life.

"Love always brings courage", says Benigni.

His film is an artistic gamble and it is a tribute to his talent and his 
screen persona that he pulls it off.

The first half is a bucolic romantic comedy, set in Tuscany in the late 
'30s. Guido (Benigni), an unemployed waiter, arrives in town with his 
friend, an unemployed furniture upholsterer, on the promise of work with 
Guido's uncle.

On the way, Guido has had an encounter with an attractive young woman, whom 
he meets again later, in town, and discovers is a local school teacher, 
Dora.

Dora is engaged to a pompous young bigwig of local fascist society, to the 
evident delight of her ambitious mother.

Guido the adventurous waiter has been smitten by Dora, however, and he sets 
out to win her. His first hurdle is just to get close enough to her to make 
a date. To achieve this he adopts various ruses, including an improptu 
masquerade as a visiting school inspector.

Hoping to merely get into the school and see Dora, he finds he is expected 
to give the staff and pupils a lecture on the new race laws and the 
superiority of the Italian version of the "Aryan" race.

When the real inspector arrives he discovers the insignificant-looking 
Benigni, half stripped, presenting the parts of his own body to the school 
as "supreme examples" of the racial ideal!

The headmistress is outraged, but Dora, more intelligent, is delighted by 
the send-up.

At a sumptuous pre-nuptial wedding dinner, Dora, feeling trapped, appeals 
to Guido to "get me out of here!" This he does, literally riding to her 
rescue, though the charger he is on is not white but multi-coloured.

A few years pass. Italy is occupied by the Nazis. Dora and Guido are 
married and have a young son. Their bookshop is regularly daubed with anti-
Jewish graffiti, and they are routinely harrassed by police and officials.

Then, on the day Dora's mother finally comes to dinner to show her 
reconciliation with them, Dora finds their home ransacked and Guido, their 
son and Guido's uncle missing. They are being loaded on to a train bound 
for a concentration camp when Dora finds them, and she demands that the 
Germans take her too.

It is in the remaining half of the film, set entirely in the concentration 
camp, that Benigni takes his greatest risk: he treats the material as 
tragi-comedy.

Seperated from Dora and the other women, Guido struggles against the odds 
to spare his son from the horror and despair, and at the same time to save 
the child's life.

In a wild flight of fancy, he convinces the boy that they are taking part 
in a game, and that whoever gains the most points will get to go home. 
Hiding, keeping quiet, all "win points" towards the magical target of 1,000 
points that means freedom.

Benigni readily admits that his portrait of the concentration camp 
experience is unrealistic. "Nothing in the film could even come close to 
the reality of what happened", he says.

"You can't show unimaginable horror — you can only show less than what it 
was. ... But I was so struck by how unfathomable the horror was, that it 
seemed quite possible for a man like Guido to pretend the whole ordeal was 
only a game."

The joyfulness in the first half of the film contributes enormously to the 
sense of tragedy in the second half. Life Is Beautiful is a 
profoundly moving film that makes you laugh and cry at the same time.

* * *

Another film that may make you laugh but certainly doesn't make you cry, is 
the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks vehicle You've Got Mail. I say vehicle 
because this is very much a commercially "packaged" film.

The producers have clearly gone looking for a suitable subject on which to 
reunite the stars and director of Sleepless In Seattle, with the 
obvious intention of repeating — if possible — the box-office success of 
that movie.

They had enough nouse to know that a good film depends on a good script, so 
they went back to one of the great writers of screenplays, the Hungarian 
playwright Lajos Biro, who wrote some of the best Hollywood films of the 
'20s and '30s before going to Britain where he wrote screenplays for 
Alexander Korda.

The vehicle they settled on was an updated remake of Biro's play The 
Shop Around The Corner, originally filmed in 1940 by Ernst Lubitsch. I 
had the very great pleasure of seeing this original version again just last 
year, in a beautiful new 35mm print.

Unusually, the original version is currently also in release in Australia, 
so I will discuss both versions, because there are some significant 
differences between them.

Biro's original play and Lubitsch's film are both set in a large shop in 
Budapest. With the exception of the shop owner (the excellent Frank 
Morgan), all the characters are employees in the store. They work for a 
living.

The film and its characters have a consciousness of prevailing social 
conditions. It is the Depression. If they lose their job it means 
unemployment and privation.

Margaret Sullavan, a wondrously appealing actress, plays a young woman who 
gets a job in the shop at the beginning of the film after being unemployed 
for many weeks, despite prior experience. There just aren't any jobs, she 
says.

She is only taken on at the shop by the owner to spite the head salesman 
(Jimmy Stewart) and she and Stewart have an openly hostile relationship 
from the beginning. But each of them, it transpires, is corresponding with 
an anonymous penpal, "on intellectual subjects" Stewart hastens to assure 
co-worker Felix Bressart.

Of course, it turns out that they are writing to each other, and the plot 
twists and turns wittily before they are finally united.

The Shop Around The Corner was remade as a musical, In The Good 
Old Summertime in 1949 with Judy Garland and Van Johnson, and then it 
went to Broadway as She Loves Me.

In this latest (non-musical) version, the script has been updated (they 
write to each other via e-mail on their lap-top computers). And of course 
it's now set in the USA (but so was the Garland/Johnson version).

But more significantly, the lead characters have been moved up-market. Meg 
Ryan signs her e-mail "Shopgirl" but she now owns the shop ( a 
bookshop called — what else — "The Shop Around The Corner". Cute, huh?)

Tom Hanks, in the Jimmy Stewart role, is no longer someone's employee, 
either. He is now the millionnaire son of a multi-millionnaire family that 
owns a chain of supermarket-type bookstores, one of which has just opened 
around the corner from Ryan's old-fashioned shop.

She mounts an initially effective campaign against the negative social 
effects of Hank's firm's destruction of small specialist bookshops, but 
when her sales continue to decline she — and the film — abandon the fight 
and she closes her shop.

This throws her employees out of work, but the film is largely unconcerned 
about that. Ryan is supposedly totally devoted to her staff, but they are 
basically forgotten once the shop finally shuts. Out of sight, out of mind.

Ryan's character discovers a previously unsuspected talent for writing 
children's books, so she's OK. The audience is also well aware that by the 
film's rapidly approaching end she will be marrying the millionnaire Hanks, 
so her future's fine.

You've Got Mail is mildly enjoyable Hollywood fluff, that leaves an 
unpleasant aftertaste.

My advice is, seek out the original, which can be found in repertory 
theatres. It's a much better work.

Life Is Beautiful is screening at selected cinemas in all capital 
cities at the moment. You've Got Mail is in general release 
everywhere.

The Shop Around The Corner is screening at the State Library in 
Brisbane on February 14 and at the Astor Theatre in Melbourne on March 7. 
It is distributed by Potential Films of Melbourne; ask your local repertory 
or revival theatre to get it.