Roberto Benigni didn't make the first Holocaust comedy, Radu Mihaileanu did. And that's no joke.
A year before Benigni released Life is Beautiful, which went on to win an Oscar and make his worldwide reputation, he was asked to play the lead in a film called Train of Life. It was a comedy about a Jewish village that escapes deportation to a death camp by buying a train and deporting itself -- to freedom.
Loved the script, Benigni told its author -- who happened to be Mihaileanu -- but he didn't want the role. And then Benigni promptly filmed his own Holocaust comedy.
Did he steal Mihaileanu's idea? You can judge for yourself starting next week, when Train of Life opens in Toronto. Although for two years it was pushed off the tracks by 1998's Life is Beautiful, it's now picking up steam. At the Venice Film Festival last year, there was a public demonstration because it wasn't in official competition, and last spring it snapped up the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. It's also winning the affection of many viewers who found Benigni's film to be in abominably bad taste.
Bad taste has been the issue in Europe, where the issue of how to talk about the Nazi horror has never been resolved. Mihaileanu's film was refused by the Cannes Festival three years ago on the grounds that a Holocaust comedy was offensive in itself. The following year, Cannes also proposed to block Life is Beautiful, but caved in under pressure from Miramax, which had invested $7-million (U.S.) in the film. This gave Life is Beautiful a head start in the world market and the novelty value of being the first Holocaust comedy.
But Mihaileanu, speaking from Munich where he teaches a course in filmmaking, is circumspect about the big-money politicking and the question of whether Benigni stole the idea for his movie. "Roberto was always very honest in admitting he'd read my script. But he says he was already making Life is Beautiful."
And the two films tell different stories, he admits. "However, the concept is there. Ask yourself: two films like that coming out 50 years after the Holocaust." Mihaileanu pauses, as if to take himself in hand. "I do have to make sure I don't get carried away about this. Maybe I'm paranoid."
Although there are many differences between the two movies, they are both attempts to get to the heart of the big question: Is there any way to tell the Holocaust story except in tragic terms?
The first big difference is that Mihaileanu, unlike Benigni, is Jewish. It would seem he came into the world expressly to make yet another tragic Holocaust film. Born in 1953 in Romania, he grew up with a grandfather who had been sent to a work camp by the Nazis and who darkly refused to discuss with his grandson what had happened there.
A turning point in Mihaileanu's childhood came when the grandfather, who had not visited his natal village, or shtetl, since he was arrested 20 years earlier, decided to go there with his family. Mihaileanu was 10 at the time. "He wanted us to see it. He spoke of it as vividly as if he were [the writer]Isaac Bashevis Singer. But when we got there, his house and synagogue were gone. Everything was gone. It gave me great pain."
Many years later, as a young filmmaker, it occurred to Mihaileanu that he could recreate his grandfather's village on-screen -- "the humour, the music, the civilization" -- but he wasn't sure how to handle the ugly end to which it came.
The answer was perversely inspired by, of all things, Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List. For Mihaileanu it was a great film. But it was also a dead end. "It seemed to me that we could not keep on telling this story this way. Tragedy wears you down, and after a time you can't respond to it any longer."
Living under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, Mihaileanu had noticed that "the only weapon Romanians had against him was humour. And by this time, survivors of the camps had begun to say that they had made jokes about the Nazis and the guards to prove they were still alive even when they were dying."
The final ingredient was the story itself, which came to him in the form of a persistent rumour in Russia that some Jews during the war had disguised themselves as Nazis and stolen a train. He was intrigued enough to look into the story, and found that it wasn't true. Wartime railway schedules revealed a system so chock-a-block that "a runaway train couldn't have gone five miles without a collision."
But the tale had persisted, and this dictated his decision that Train of Life would be a "Jewish fairy tale." He lovingly and accurately recreated the shtetl, as he had dreamed of doing, but made sure the story was so improbable that no one would mistake it for a serious drama. The villagers, for instance, acquire a locomotive so decrepit that a month in a railway shop wouldn't fix it -- and have it sparkling overnight. Led by young shtetl men impersonating Nazi guards, they fool real Nazis into letting them use a military kitchen to prepare gefilte fish. The situation was impossible, and it was funny. "There is comedy inherent in a Jew dressing up as a Nazi and saying oy," Mihaileanu has remarked.
But he was careful to keep the actual concentration camps off-screen. For him, the film "is less about the Shoah [Holocaust]and more about the shtetl. Why? Because I still don't understand how humanity ended up with the Shoah."
And this is where he begins to really tear a strip off Benigni. He is convinced that Benigni doesn't understand the Holocaust either. "But he has committed the enormity of setting his movie in a concentration camp."
In Life is Beautiful, Benigni plays a Jew who is deported with his young son. He fools the boy into believing the camp is a strange summer holiday and that they will win a prize if they do as the soldiers say. The film is created in a spirit of blissful mirth and, for Mihaileanu, total ignorance of Jewish culture. "It is Jewish belief that you must tell the truth to children."
He adds: "I don't think that Benigni is a bad guy, but he fell into the trap of a subject that was too big for him." And the film's popularity? "Maybe humanity doesn't want to carry this weight any more."
Mihaileanu, like most French-speaking filmmakers (he lives in Paris), has a chip on his shoulder about American culture. But he doesn't blame the entertainment-addled U.S. public for the success of Benigni's film, which did equally well in many other countries. On the contrary, he hopes that the United States will help to incubate new creative ways of looking at the Shoah (Mihaileanu prefers this term to Holocaust).
"What I think has happened in America is that people learned what the Shoah is through Schindler's List. Also, a lot of Americans are Jewish or have adapted Yiddish words into English, so there is a receptivity to a film like mine, which is actually about Yiddish culture."
Without prompting, he also gives credit to the single film that could be said to be a progenitor of Train of Life: Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 masterpiece To Be Or Not To Be. In that film, which is also often accused of bad taste, a troupe of Jewish actors in Poland impersonate a troupe of German actors in order not to be picked up by the Gestapo.
"That film was also rejected by Cannes," says Mihaileanu with relish. "And it's true that Lubitsch made it before the war was over. He didn't know the full extent of the horror. That makes the film excusable, some say. But I think that's wrong. It's a masterpiece, and would be even if it were made today."
Mihaileanu is European to his core, so it comes as a surprise to learn that his next film will be shot in English -- in Toronto. "But why not? I'm not a purist. The film is based on Mark Bimm's thriller, Off the Wall. He's an American living in Paris, and the story is set in Los Angeles. I've changed it to Toronto, and I'm looking forward to it."
But he draws a firm line between a commercial film like Off the Wall and a film like Train of Life. "When you deal with such a serious subject, you have to be careful not to make it false. We live in a world of the Internet and of uncontrollable communications, and people are going to mix up historical truth and fiction sooner or later. But no artist should willingly contribute to this process. You have to tell the truth. And if you're inventing, you have to let the viewer know that you're inventing."