The first half of the movie is a whimsical, romantic, somewhat slapstick comedy set in the years before World War II. Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni), a young Italian Jew, arrives in Arezzo, where he plans to set up a bookstore, taking a job as a waiter at his uncle's hotel.
Guido is both funny and charismatic, especially when he romances a local school teacher, Dora, saying she is beautiful like the morning sunrise (portrayed by Benigni's actual wife Nicoletta Braschi). Dora, however, comes from a wealthy, aristocratic, non-Jewish Italian family. Dora's mother wants her to marry a well-to-do civil servant, but Dora falls instead for Guido where he ends up stealing her away at her engagement party from her aristocratic and arrogant fianc.
Several years pass in which Guido and Dora marry and have a son, Giosu (Giorgio Cantarini).
Dora and her mother (Marisa Paredes) are estranged due to the unequal marriage. Later on, a reconciliation takes place just prior to Giosu's fourth birthday.
In the second half of the film, World War II has already begun. Guido, Uncle Eliseo and Giosu are forced onto a train and taken to a concentration campon Giosu's birthday. Despite being a non-Jew, Dora demands to be on the same train to join her family and is permitted to do so.
In the camp, Guido hides his son from the Nazi guards, sneaks him food and tries to humor him. In an attempt to keep up Giosu's spirits, Guido convinces him that the camp is just a game, in which the first person to get 1,000 points wins a tank. He tells him that if he cries, complains that he wants his mother or says that he is hungry, he will lose points, while quiet boys who hide from the camp guards earn points.
Guido convinces Giosu that the camp guards are mean because they want the tank for themselves and that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game. He puts off Giosu's requests to end the game and return home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant misery, sickness and death, Giosu does not question this fiction because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence.
Guido maintains this story right until the end when, in the chaos caused by the American advance, he tells his son to stay in a sweatbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. After trying to find Dora, Guido is caught, taken away and shot dead by a Nazi guard, but not before making his son laugh one last time by imitating the Nazi guard as if the two of them are marching around the camp together.
Giosu manages to survive and thinks he has won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp. He is reunited with his mother, not knowing that his father has been killed. Years later, he realizes the sacrifice his father made for him, and that it was because of that sacrifice that he is still alive today. In the film, Giosu is four and a half years old; however, both the beginning and ending of the film are narrated by an older Giosu recalling his father's story of sacrifice for his family.
source: wikipedia
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