The wife is truly lovely. I am blanking on her name right now, but she is actually Benigni's wife, so there is an extra rapport there [Edit:Benigni's Life Is Beautiful co-star, Nicoletta Braschi, is also his wife of 19 years. She has starred in four of his films.]. Both she and Benigni have appeared in movies by Jim Jarmusch. In the movie "Mystery Train", she plays a woman who has to take her deceased husband's remains back to Italy, and inadvertently ends up on the wrong side of Memphis, staying in a flop house and helping out a ditzy woman who is short on money by letting her share a room. She moves through the episode with a bewildered dignity, still in shock over her husband's death, but handling things. Whether because of strain, or as a sort of gift, she sees Elvis in the middle of the night.....
Your particular observations about "Life is Beautiful" were very good, and it is, indeed, hard not to want to spend some time brutalizing Nazis by the end of it. When one of the camps, I believe Buchenwald, was liberated, the first American soldiers entering were so upset by what they saw that they snapped, and just started beating and gunning down Nazi guards. The situation was so volatile that the officers held back for 20 minutes or so before trying to impose discipline, because of the danger of mutiny if the men had been confronted..... |
