Thank you, and have a good night's rest (I napped in the evening)....
The subject of the Holocaust in inherently delicate, and all the more so if one has a sense of historical relation to it. All of my father's family came from a couple of towns around Riga, in Latvia, and had my antecedents stayed, they almost certainly would have been killed, very likely in the first wave of executions. Thus, a comic treatment of the theme is inherently dangerous, and if I had not had a familiarity with Benigni, and known that he had a sort of "little tramp" aura, I am not sure I would have gone. But the theme of trying to shield your children from terrible things has a strong resonance, and there was no stinting on the horror of their predicament, and the father died in the end, so it was not an artificially happy ending. The death paid for the rapidity of liberation and the swiftness of reunion, as it were, to prevent it from seeming to easy. In the end, to have such a fate befall such a family is almost unbearable, and the humor merely makes it possible to bear, it does not trivialize it..... |
