TEARS OF A CLOWN

Italian director-actor Roberto Benigni is famous for his slapstick hits. But his latest movie, Life Is Beautiful, which took second prize at Cannes, is a daring paradox: a comedy set in the Holocaust

Italy has produced the year's most surprising cinematic oxymoron: a bittersweet Holocaust comedy. Yet Roberto Benigni, the 45-year-old director-star of Life Is Beautiful, this year's Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes, says he didn't consciously choose his movie's tone. It was part of the narrative that just popped into his head. It wasn't that he was blind to the problem of combining humor with genocide. In fact, the prospect actively "scared" his wife and co-star, Nicoletta Braschi. But Benigni couldn't get the story out of his head. His tale of a happy-go-lucky Italian Jew, who works to convince his small son (played by Giorgio Cantarini) that their life in a Nazi extermination camp is merely part of a grand and complicated game, obsessed him. And now it's having a similar effect on audiences.

"I felt," Benigni says, "as Primo Levi said, the 'desire to give my contribution to this horror.' I couldn't think of another story. I tried. " Thin and wiry, with a ring of springy hair circumscribing his massive bald spot, the star is known for films such as Johnny Stecchino and The Monster, which draw on classic slapstick style. And even in Life Is Beautiful, Benigni's old habits remain: flowerpots drop on Fascists; raw eggs add to the sense of burlesque. Benigni's protagonist suffers from a sense of mistaken identity, a condition which serves as a metaphor for the character's choosing to overlook the encroaching menace of Fascism.

Some criticize the director for daring to use humor in this context. But he stands by his film, proudly pointing to the example of his father, who survived a German forced-labor camp and taught his son that levity can help exorcise pain. "When we started to laugh, so did he," says his son. "The nightmares STOPPED."

JUDY BACHRACH