For generations of Chinese film fans, there are always a few classic lines that are common memories.
"Some birds can't be kept in cages."
"Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what the next piece will taste like."
"Is life always so painful? Or is it only like this when I was a kid? - Always. ”
"If I never see you again, I wish you a good morning, a good afternoon, and a good night."
These sentences always make people think philosophically, but it is annoying to say too much. But there are a few sentences that can always poke at the softest part of a person's heart:
"Good morning, princess!"
"You're going to get a thousand points, and whoever gets a thousand points has a tank!"
"Listen, even if I don't come back for a long time, don't move, don't come out, until there's no sound, no one."
"It was my experience, it was the sacrifice my father made."
A few words can make the macho man cry, and the rough man burst into tears.
These lines are from the Italian film "Beautiful Life", the degree of classicity needless to say, Douban nearly 790,000 people hit a score of 9.5.
It was released in the mainland on January 3, and the attendance rate crushed a number of Chinese films.
The story of the film is almost a household name, and the love and affection in it are so deep that there is no need to repeat it.
What we're going to talk about today is the behind-the-scenes story of this great film, and the controversy and discussion it's encountered.
Bernini was born in a small village in Italy, and his fate was relatively bumpy.
I went to the priest's school, which was later flooded. Obsessed with circus, but was burned when he learned to play with fire.
He later fell in love with film and acting, and the one that shocked him the most was Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940). It gave Bernini a new appreciation for the power of comedy, which is that "through comedy, it is easier to reach deep pain".
But it wasn't until he won the Oscar in 1999 for "A Beautiful Life" that Bernini gradually gained recognition as an "Italian national treasure actor".
It was the last year of the 20th century, and for many years his development in Italy had not been smooth, and he was once blocked by the censorship department.
In 1976, he starred in and wrote the TV series Onda Libera (literally: Freedom Wave) and wrote a poem called L'inno del corpo scilto (Holy Anthem for Purifying the Body), which celebrates the pleasure of urinating on.
Young Bernini
Italy's Catholic censors were so annoyed that they banned the TV series and the song.
This led to Bernini once no one dared to hire, and could only make cameo roles in some film and television dramas. In defiance, he made a cameo appearance on a talk show, playing a film critic who never watched movies, and satirized the absurdity of the censorship department.
As a result, talk shows were also banned.
It wasn't until Giuseppe Bertolucci recommended him to his brother Bernardo Bertolucci (director of The Last Emperor) to play a small, unspoken role in Luna that Bernini's career took off.
Bernini, who was banned for being too direct in comedy satire, gradually became calm and introverted. He revisited chaplin, his childhood favorite, and tried to make "neuro-comedy" more realistic, leading to the later outlaws (1986), Naughty Cop (1993), and The Hunt for The Devil (1994).
"Hunting Crazy Demon" Douban 8.2 points
"The Hunt for The Devil" is Bernini's second collaboration with his wife, Nicoleta Blaski, after Outlaws, and the first work of melampo cinematografica, a film company he and his wife founded—in Nicoleta's words: "With his own studio, Bernini can do the film he wants to do with complete freedom."
The next thing they created was "A Beautiful Life".
Roberto Bernini's father, named Luigi.
In 1943, he made a living as a carpenter and went to Albania to earn a living for his family. After arriving, he was pulled by train to a concentration camp and imprisoned for 3 years.
During these 3 years of concentration camp life, he had to endure mental and physical pain, like the prisoners before the Holocaust in Auschwitz, forced to work for the Germans.
Later, when he told his son about the experience, he often mentioned building tracks for tanks. They don't have enough to eat, but they still have to carry heavy tracks from one workshop to another.
Often people fall on the road and get their legs or arms smashed. Those who could no longer stand up were stripped naked and pulled out, and disappeared from the sight of their fellow inmates.
In addition to the tank tracks, luigi's narration was also impressed by Bernini.
One of the inmates was temporarily dispatched to clean up the bodies in the gas chambers. While dragging a corpse, the inmate suddenly froze. But soon, he put the body on the cart and went back to pull down a corpse...
After the work was over, the prisoner asked him what was wrong, and he said sheepishly: The dead man was my wife.
As he grew older, Bernini forgot a lot of things. But only the tank tracks, and the scene of the consignment of his wife's body, lingered in his mind, and gradually came up with the idea of making a movie.
But the subject matter is too poignant after all, and few directors have handled it as a comedy. Except for Chaplin's 1940 "The Great Dictator" in the United States, Ernst Liu Bieqian's 1942 "You Run Away and I Run Away", and the French director Gérard Uri's 1966 "Tiger's Mouth Escape", which is extremely well-known, people can hardly find successful comedic World War II films.
Bernini, for his part, was very inclined to use Chaplin-esque comedy, saying, "Before I met Chaplin, I had no idea where life would take me. ”
In any of his works, he does not hesitate to show Chaplin's influence on himself: exaggerated body language, rich facial expressions, and a tight plot setting.
In A Beautiful Life, his tribute to Chaplin is more direct: guido's number of the prisoners worn in the concentration camp is the same as the number of the prisoners Chaplin wore in The Great Dictator, 7397.
But at that time, no one in the Italian production company was willing to give Bernini money. With the exception of his wife, Nicoleta Blatski, Bernini had no supporters at all.
It wasn't until he met Harvey Weinstein that he had a second confidant.
Harvey Weinstein joined during the filming of "A Beautiful Life", and with his unique vision, he won the global distribution rights of the film except in Italy.
Weinstein stepped in and had three effects on the film:
First, Bernini's 125-minute version was cut down to 116 minutes, within the 2-hour red line (the most common version of Life Is Beautiful).
The 125-minute guide cut, which begins with more of the company logo, Guido talks more about philosophy when discussing Schopenhauer with friends, Guido introduces a few more body parts when he pretends to be a visual scholar to preach racial superiority, and Guido imitates sunflower bows when he meets his lover in the restaurant.
Second, adjust the end of the movie, so that the soldiers who drive tanks to rescue the concentration camp become American soldiers. Many media and critics see this as currying favor with Hollywood.
Third, Weinstein sent "A Beautiful Life" to the Oscars, received 7 nominations, and won 3 awards for best foreign language film, best actor and best original score.
In addition to the film's own quality, Weinstein also tried his best to play his own three axes: lobbying the Oscar judges, manipulating media opinion, and smearing opponents.
According to journalist Peter Biskinder in his book "Down and Dirty Pictures," Harvey Weinstein's Shakespeare and Beautiful Life won the prize because of Weinstein's PR tricks:
Independent studios could spend $250,000 on Oscar PR, and large companies could spend $2 million. But Weinstein spent at least $5 million on Shakespeare's Love Story. After the Oscar nominations were announced, Weinstein invited Roberto Bernini to Los Angeles, where he stayed for more than a month. It started with a welcome dinner for him, followed by a press conference to circumvent the Academy's rule that judges cannot participate in events for nominees, and lobbied the Oscar judges. At the height of the polling season, Weinstein even threw a party for Bernini every night, feasting on the Oscar judges. During this time, Bernini made many friends, and they helped him win best foreign language film and gave him an Oscar for acting.
In this way, Weinstein's films won the Oscars of that year, the film queen, and the best film and the best foreign language film.
"Shakespeare's Love Story" beat "Saving Private Ryan" and was called "the most watery Oscar best picture in history". "Shakespeare's Love History" also won "Truman's World" at the Screenplay Award!
The heroine "Little Pepper" Gwyneth Paltrow, defeated Carter Blanchett and Aunt May, won the best actress, and has since carried the "Water Queen" brand with her.
In comparison, the controversy of "Beautiful Life" is relatively small, but many people feel that the best foreign language film award should be given to the Iranian film "Little Shoes" of the same year.
"Little Shoes"
Roberto Bernini also has strong opponents at the Film Awards, with Tom Hanks of "Saving Private Ryan", Ian McLean of "Gods and Beasts" and Edward Norton of "American X-Files".
But in the end Roberto Bernini made the podium twice and contributed one of the best moments in Oscar history.
When he won best foreign language film, he jumped up with excitement and stood on the back of the seat with exaggeration and pride.
On the podium, Bernini was so excited that he rushed to the stage and said, "Harvey Weinstein, thank you for all you have done for me!" ”
At the celebration feast that night, the two left another famous photo: Weinstein and Bernini each took a small golden man and touched a wine glass to celebrate.
"Beautiful Life" enjoys high praise in the mainland, ranking sixth in the Douban Top 250 list. But in the North American first-line media, the reputation of "Beautiful Life" plummeted.
The freshness of top Rotten Tomatoes film critics was only 56% (at that time, Rotten Tomatoes was just a year old, and today's internet celebrities, youtubers, and film critic bloggers have not yet entered a large number of stations, so top critics are more representative), and only 59 points (out of 100) on metacritic.
Perhaps due to geographical and cultural differences, domestic audiences are more receptive to concentration camp themes and comedic settings, but North American film critics have polarized comments.
The focus of criticism by the negative media and film critics is:
The concentration camps under Roberto Bernini's lens, without blood stains and torture, nor do they see deeper loneliness and cruelty, but are filled with German officers and soldiers who can be teased, such as Guido, who can pretend to translate, distort the regulations of German soldiers, and let dirty sons eat with German children without being discovered.
The concentration camp in "A Beautiful Life" is fairytale. This allows the audience to maintain a more comfortable viewing distance, not only does not feel the visual and psychological impact necessary for other concentration camps and Holocaust movies, but can have a light-hearted sarcasm and joke.
Bernini was certainly not the first director to portray concentration camps and massacres in a comedic way, but Chaplin's The Great Dictator was.
But in the eyes of the media and film critics, "The Great Dictator" was released in 1940, the concentration camps and massacres under the Nazi atrocities have not yet been exposed, and Chaplin only used the film to artistically process the existing historical facts;
"Beautiful Life" was released in 1997, about the Nazi concentration camps and massacres, has long been recognized by the world as a human evil, Bernini used a childish perspective and means, but also the historical facts that should have been faced squarely, is the shallowness and regression of the artist's humanitarianism.
It is said that Spielberg, who also filmed the concentration camp theme, tried to leave the scene during the viewing process.
In addition to the above two arguments, there is another detail in the film that is worth pondering: does the German military doctor who is exchanging riddles with Guido want to help Guido?
Some viewers think that the military doctor wants to help, but due to the pressure of the real environment, he can't do anything.
But in the eyes of another part of the audience, the doctor didn't care about anything but riddles, including Guido's request and life. As for him arranging for Guido to enter the banquet, and repeatedly showing embarrassment and secretly talking to Guido, it was only he who wanted to take the opportunity to ask Guido for puzzles and confide in his distress and helplessness trapped by riddles. In his eyes, Guido's life was far less than a riddle.
Each of these three issues has its own account, and when Roberto Bernini returned to Italy from Hollywood, the media asked for confirmation in person. But he seems to have been hollowed out by "A Beautiful Life", not only not commenting on these questions, but even choosing to stop filming, and only returning to the film world with "Pinocchio" three years later.
Unfortunately, the wizard, who won the film emperor and best foreign language film for "A Beautiful Life", won the Worst Director Award for Jin Acid Mei three years later with "Pinocchio".
"Beautiful Life" is still an unsurpassable achievement in Bernini's career, but a filmmaker can have such a work in his life.
As for the criticism of North American film critics, it seems to be only the emotion of a special period of time.
*Text/Feast
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