Life Is Beautiful and Seven Beauties

People who commented on the movie, Life Is Beautiful (Clio’s Psyche, June, 1999), shared an assumption: partly set in a Nazi concentration camp, it seems obviously to be about the Holocaust. But a setting does not necessarily define a movie’s theme.

Life Is Beautiful is about a father’s devotion to his son. What is meant to be beautiful is neither the Holocaust nor surviving it. It is the father’s devotion—his gift to his son—which is obsessive, creative, and self-sacrificing. He saves his son from mental trauma and death by creating a fantasy world—creating it so well that the boy loses touch with reality.

Creating an illusion is the father’s characteristic method of solving problems. He is a silly, charming conjuror and, in that sense, charismatic. In one long scene he impersonates a Fascist official expounding the illusion of Aryan racial supremacy. Later, in a parallel scene, he takes on the role of a concentration camp official, expounding camp rules. Both times, what he expounds is a mockery. Nonetheless, both times,

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he speaks for the totalitarian state.

Seeing him use his manipulative method with his son troubled me. I suspect it was meant to have that effect. We are—or should be—troubled (even if charmed) by people who interfere with our sense of what is going on. Hitler and Mussolini—the villains behind the movie’s scenes—offered to save their people by creating fantasy worlds for them. Perhaps the parallel was unintended. In any case, I pursue reality obsessively and take too many things seriously. The idea of solving a life problem by living an illusion upsets me. My sensitivity to parents’ fostering illusions in children is extreme and applies even to misleading children about trivial things.

Writers in Clio’s Psyche compared Life Is Beautiful to Seven Beauties. Both movies are farces and both are surreal. In Seven Beauties the surrealism is made obvious by dreamy cinematography. In Life Is Beautiful the cinematography is realistic in style, making the surrealism subtler. That may be a reason why viewers are more troubled by implausibility and by discrepancies between movie scenes and historical facts in Life Is Beautiful than in Seven Beauties. All farces resemble life; otherwise they would be pointless. But taking the resemblance literally is an obstacle to resonating with the theme.

I share the view that the Holocaust should not be made light of. Nonetheless, I believe one can make useful jokes about it without detracting from its importance or impact. Both movies do this: Life Is Beautiful does it gaily; Seven Beauties, grimly. But a joke that works for one person may be inappropriate or disgusting to another. In watching Seven Beauties I had the most trouble accepting the “reality” of—and was most disgusted by—the camp commandant, who was presented as both beautiful and ugly. (I also had trouble accepting any woman as a death camp commandant.) Being drawn to her pornographically, disgusted by her, and frightened by her—simultaneously—was upsetting. This was probably the intended effect, enabling the viewer to experience what the hero was experiencing. For him the problem was intensified by his being starved and her being the dispenser of nourishment.

Although partly set in a death camp, Seven Beauties is also not about the Holocaust. I think its main theme is the relationship between totalitarianism and prostitution—both sexual prostitution and prostitution of one’s self in a broad sense.

After surviving the death camp by participating in its corruption, the hero returns to his mother, who is a gentler, less aware alter ego of the camp commandant. Having thought him dead, in her joy she declares, “You are alive.” But he is dead spiritually and has become a figure of death. As the movie ends, he is about to complete the spiritual murder of the once innocent child who adores him by marrying her—a crime to which she naively consents.

Sexual prostitution in Seven Beauties is so literal and blatant that the viewer may miss the movie’s more disturbing observations on prostitution of the self under totalitarianism. The theme of prostitution in Life Is Beautiful is subtler but similarly profound. The father and hero—while rejecting the appeal of totalitarianism—has been prostituting himself, along with the majority who consciously accept it. Particularly he has been playing up to the most insidious representative of the totalitarian state—the doctor, who is a gracious patron of the restaurant where the hero works as a waiter. The hero encounters him again as an official in the concentration camp and plays up to him again. He hopes the doctor will make an exception of him and his family, and save them. His disillusionment is painful, as he realizes he can rely only on himself. If the tragedy of his prostituting himself goes unnoticed, then we (like the hero’s son) are being taken in by his charm, or being put off by his buffoonery. If so, the loss is ours.

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