Kitsch as Weapon

With the war in Iraq far from over, Roberto Benigni has already made a comedy about it. He is one of the very few filmmakers who raise the truly important questions these days: How is it possible, or permissible, to depict human suffering? By Philipp Bühler

It seems the Italian comedian can't help playing on his gifts as a chatterbox and general pain in the neck and constantly getting stuck in the hairiest situations. In "Life Is Beautiful" (1997), for instance, the controversial Holocaust comedy that garnered him three Oscars in 1999. Benigni is the clown in the minefield – literally, in the case of "The Tiger and the Snow".

This time his name is Attilio, but as usual he might as well be called Roberto – in reality life never imitates art, but reality is exactly what Roberto Benigni shrugs his shoulders at. Just like Attilio, starving poet and incurable romantic. He can think of nothing but his beloved Vittoria (once again Nicoletta Braschi, still Benigni's real-life spouse) – though she wants nothing to do with him.

A clown in the minefield

After all, the very persistence with which Attilio declares his love for her suggests how exhausting it could be to live with him. Maybe that's why she goes to Iraq. At any rate, there she is wounded in a terrorist attack and falls into a coma. Without the slightest hesitation, Attilio joins a Red Cross aid convoy and sets out in pursuit. All the way to Baghdad, where bombs explode daily and people are desperate – desperate for anything but an Italian jokester.

Comparisons with "Life Is Beautiful" are inevitable. It featured Benigni as the Jewish Guido, who takes on the role of solo entertainer and storyteller in the second part of the film, set in Auschwitz, to hide the full horror of the situation from his little son. The nightmare of the death camp is transformed into the "tank game", a sort of scavenger hunt.

In "The Tiger and the Snow" he talks away at Vittoria, the woman in the coma, spinning yarns about outstanding medical care and the rosy future. Benigni counters the awful reality with illusions and laughter, making tragedy into feel-good comedy. The same attempt to play with horror provoked vehement protests in the case of "Life is Beautiful".

The Jewish filmmaker Mel Brooks, himself the producer of the Nazi satire "The Producers" (2005), recently said: "He shows the barracks where Jews were kept like cattle and makes jokes at the same time. The movie's philosophy is: people can get over anything. No they can't. They can't get over concentration camps."

Love in times of horror

It must be said in Benigni's favor that he does not try to imitate reality in his intentionally artificial films. Here too he remains true to form, showing his contempt for an inhumane environment by ignoring it. The suffering Iraqis – the film was made in Tunisia – hardly feature, except for a sad-eyed doctor. The movie is about love, not war or peace.

Attilio wants to make love, as fast and as often as possible. And the war must stop because it is in his way. But first he has to supply the dying Vittoria with a medicine that is nowhere to be found. Conditions in the hospital are catastrophic, the pharmacies are closed, and on top of it all his moped runs out of gas – in Iraq!

In what is unquestionably the funniest scene in the movie, he winds up at an American checkpoint with relief supplies dangling from his body. The harried GIs mistake him for a suicide bomber. But of course everything turns out fine in the end. At least for Attilio and his great love.

Benigni's most recent film, "Pinocchio" (2002), in which he starred as Italy's second most famous fibber, was a major flop. This time, too, he comes up short – but not because of thorny aesthetic issues such as the impossibility of depicting the inconceivable, which he mastered so impressively in "Life is Beautiful". It is easy to forgive him again for blurring the border to reality.

"I've found the weapons of mass destruction!"

The problem is not that the balance of tragedy and comedy fails to measure up to his former perfection. It is that the subplots and supporting characters fail to click, resulting in a sometimes-appealing sloppiness. Benigni must carry the entire film. However much one enjoys his barrage of lewd jokes and sentimental sayings, he is often functioning in a vacuum.

It's a very funny moment when he presents Vittoria with a fly-swatter and announces: "I've found the weapons of mass destruction!" But given her sad state – it's hard to carry on a conversation with a coma patient – the gag fizzles. Jean Reno as a famous Iraqi poet with weltschmerz doesn't improve matters.

But the one-and-only Benigni deserves credit: he is one of the very few filmmakers who even raise the truly important questions these days. How is it possible, or permissible, to depict human suffering? What can we laugh at? What do we have to laugh at? This puts him in the tradition of great comic directors such as Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch, who were also attacked for their anti-Nazi satires "The Great Dictator" (1940) and "To Be or Not to Be" (1942).

Benigni willingly risks being accused of kitsch, but at his best he turns kitsch into a weapon against a world which no one likes the way it is. He leaves no doubt that life still isn't beautiful. But people should at least be allowed to believe that it is. Otherwise, as he says in the film, you could "pack up the whole illusion that the world is turning and cart it away!"

Philipp Bühler

Translated from the German by Isabel Cole.

(La tigre e la neve) Italy 2005, director: Roberto Benigni, screenplay: Roberto Benigni, Vincenzo Cerami, with Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Jean Reno, Tom Waits, Emilia Fox, Gianfranco Varetto, Giuseppe Battiston.

Qantara.de

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