Two movies in one. The mostly charming and inventive first half traces an unhurried courtship by funnyman Roberto Benigni (also the director) of his regular co-star and real-life wife, Nicoletta Braschi. In the second half, picking up the characters' lives several years after the birth of their son, Benigni tries to do something like Chaplin in The Great Dictator, something even more like Jerry Lewis in the unreleased (unreleasable?) The Day the Clown Cried, when the family gets shipped off to a Nazi concentration camp, and the father weaves an elaborate tissue of lies to protect the saucer-eyed tyke from the reality around them. One way or another -- for schmaltz, for trivialization, for solipsistic narrowness, for improbability -- the second half is in dubious taste. Both halves are radiantly photographed by the masterly Tonino Delli Colli. With Marisa Paredes, Horst Buchholz, Giorgio Cantarini. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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