Life is Beautiful and Holocaust Comedy: A New Film Genre?

During the half-century or so that has passed since the Second World War, fewer than half-a-dozen feature films treated the events of the Holocaust with humor. Now, within the space of just one year, at least three Holocaust comedies have appeared. Although we can’t be certain that such films will continue to proliferate, it is possible that we are witnessing the emergence of Holocaust Comedy as a new movie genre. We will have to wait and see what happens. In any event, I would argue that Life Is Beautiful should not be considered as an isolated phenomenon. Indeed, consideration of at least a couple of the other recent films, as well as a much older one that never got released, enable us better to understand the remarkable box office success of Life Is Beautiful.

Of the current new comic treatments, Train de Vie is the one that has most often been compared with Life Is Beautiful. Made by Radu Mihaileanu, a Romania-born, France-based director, the film has not yet been released in North America. It was shown at the Sundance Festival, however, and at one special screening in Los Angeles. What little I know of this movie comes from a few Canadian and Italian print media; Variety; the Web site set up for the film; and a few on-line reports originating in a couple of the European countries where it has been screened in commercial cinemas. Although each film made its festival debut in 1998, work on Train de Vie had begun in 1993, and its director gave Benigni a copy of the script in 1996, when he offered him the key role of the town clown. While Benigni declined the offer, it might have been the inspiration behind his own film, for he began working on Life Is Beautiful shortly afterwards.

Train de Vie has a number of important things in common with Life Is Beautiful: both have a comic Jewish figure in the central role, both employ concentration camp settings, and both have similar narrative framing devices. However, there are also important differences between the two comedies, as is evident from the plot and details about Train de Vie that can be found on the film’s official Web site. In a recent interview, Mihaileanu has explained his intentions in making his movie: “Not to banalize, not to rewrite but to keep the discussion going. I wanted to depict the tragedy of the Holocaust using the language of comedy, to use comedy to strengthen the tragedy.”

The critical success of Train de Vie in some European countries, together with the box office success of Life Is Beautiful, may well convince North American distributors to overcome their habitual reluctance, for box office reasons, to release here any film that comes bearing the burden of sub-titles. Or, it might not appear until the forthcoming dubbed version of Life Is Beautiful has been completed, with the film then distributed to the large additional market represented by airlines and video rental stores.

Another contribution to the new genre can be identified in reports from the Berlin Film Festival, held in February of this year. At least one of the films presented there treats the Nazi era and the background of Auschwitz with humor. The film is by the Spanish director, Fernando Trueba, and is entitled The Girl of Our Dreams. It has, according to one reviewer, “many elements of a bedroom farce.” The Director himself has insisted that “I don’t think it is daring to do this now.…”

Trueba’s judgement about the effect of the passing of time seems well-founded. About thirty years ago, Jerry Lewis made a film called The Day the Clown Wept. This too was a comedy set in a concentration camp, the clown being used by the S.S. to lead children into the gas chambers. Apparently, the final sequence showed laughing children following the clown, who is juggling bits of bread as he leads them into the gas chamber where they all die, the final shot being a puff of smoke from a tall chimney. Not much else is known about the film, because it was never distributed. The reasons for its non-release are not clear, but it is probably safe to speculate that the release of such a film today would not be problematic.

Before concluding, there is one important point I should acknowledge quite explicitly: I have not commented directly upon Life Is Beautiful because I have not seen it (nor do I wish to see it). I have been reading about the movie and tracking its reception, here and abroad, ever since its debut at Cannes. This fairly diligent monitoring has been prompted not only by my interest in the subject matter of the movie because I am Jewish, but also because of my special fascination with Italian movies: I’m an active member of the Italian Film Society of Canada. My conclusion from reading reviews, interviews, synopses, and whatever else I could find about the movie is a fairly simple one: it seems to be a successfully hyped piece of feel-good entertainment, a Holocaust success story. Not Holocaust kitsch perhaps, more like Holocaust Lite. But off-putting for me is Benigni’s insistent representation of the movie as a fable. This seems

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to me to be a masquerade. A fable employs radical simplifications in order to enhance a particular truth or truths. But the core of the Holocaust was the murdering of millions in an effort to exterminate an entire people. I have yet to hear anyone identify any truth about the Holocaust that this movie illuminates.

A friend recently reminded me that in one of Woody Allen’s movies the character played by Alan Alda observes that “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” Perhaps. But for me, never enough time could pass to accept this movie as a comic fable. If truth be the issue, then I need to report that I grew up as a Jew in England in the 1930s and 1940s, very much aware of and thankful for my great good luck. Had I been located just a couple of dozen miles to the east, across a narrow body of water, I too would have been in German-occupied territory. Or, if Germany had occupied England, I don’t doubt that the anti-Semitism of many English neighbors would have facilitated the extermination efforts of the occupying forces, and that I would not have been either resilient or independent enough to have contrived a means of hiding and surviving. I would have been one of Jerry Lewis’ “laughing children.”

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