This movie review courtesy of Mr A Taubman
Life is Beautiful is an Italian film starring Robert Benigni, who is considered something of a national treasure in Italy as a Chaplinesque comic. Dialogue is in Italian with quite good English subtitles. You will have to keep your eye on these as you will miss some beauties otherwise.
Starting in Italy just before it entered WWII (1939/40 I think), it is a film with two distinct moods; the first half is pure, joyful physical comedy, full of invention and cleverness. The deft touch with which he sets up situations that feed into jokes, sometimes many minutes later in the film, is remarkable. No effort is expended on realism or plausibility, but you will not care because you will be laughing too much. Effectively all that happens is that he meets the girl of his dreams, and charms her into marrying him rather than a local yokel.
The second half is constructed from a more sombre palette. There are still plenty of laughs, but the almost unnoticed rise of facism in the background of the first half comes to the fore---or at least the middle---ground. It is now 1944, Italy is defeated but has been occupied by the Germans. It turns out the Benigni's character Guido is an Italian jew, and he is finally taken by the Germans and shipped off to the Camps, along with his 5 year old child. His wife volunteers to join him on the prison train although she is not jewish; they take her anyway. The rest of the movie consists of he and his child surviving the Camp by pretending it is just a game; he also finds occasional ways to contact his wife in the women's section. This part is filmed in Auschwitz but must be set elsewhere as they are eventually liberated by US soldiers, not Russians.
This is an almost perfect film for what it set out to do. A number of the scenes in the Camp are unrealistic - they seem to have an awful lot of freedom of movement, and he never gets punished for his transgressions (very much in the spirit of the Universal Clown who can get away with anything) - but this is not the point. There can't be a harder task for a filmmaker than setting a comedy in a Nazi death camp, but Life is Beautiful succeeds beyond all expectation. Strongly recommended.