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Herald rating: * * *
You don't have to have dreamed that, dressed only in your underwear, you are marrying the person of your dreams, while Tom Waits plays the piano and a cop demands you move your car, in order to enjoy the new film by Roberto Benigni - but it would certainly help.
Just such a recurring dream dogs the poet Attilio De Giovanni (Benigni himself, naturally) in this gentle and charmingly aimless valentine to love and poetry.
Benigni was the writer-director-star of the masterful Life is Beautiful, whose many vocal critics probably didn't know that the film-maker's father spent two years in Bergen-Belsen. This film will attract opprobrium for another reason: set against the backdrop of the war in Iraq (though filmed in Tunisia), it conspicuously fails to engage with its political context. Indirectly, it is an anti-war film, since it is about the power of love to triumph over adversity, but opponents of the US-led invasion will find little of comfort here.
Benigni tells the story of the poet who follows the love of his life to hell and back. De Giovanni is a writer and passionately theatrical poetry teacher who attends a reading in Rome by his friend, Fuad (Reno), a celebrated Iraqi poet.
There he meets Vittoria (Braschi), who is writing a book on Fuad - and who just happens to be the lustrous lead character from his recurring dream. Lovestruck, he courts her (with little success) but when, a few weeks later, Fuad calls him from Iraq to say that Vittoria has been injured in the bombing and is close to death, he rushes to her bedside.
Well, actually he lurches and stumbles there: his journey and later attempts to get her lifesaving drugs and equipment in a city where they don't have aspirin occupies the rest of the film.
Benigni channels Chaplin as he impersonates a surgeon, hijacks a camel and moves heaven and earth to revive the woman he loves.
Devoid as it is of political bite, this is a far less ambitious film than Life. In essence it's a showcase for Benigni's winsome comic charms and he delivers.
It's soaked in a sense of magic and wonderment - not least when Waits sings You Can Never Hold Back Spring - and if it doesn't amount to a lot, that never seems to matter.
Cast: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Jean Reno
Director: Roberto Benigni
Running time: 114 minutes
Rating: M, contains low level offensive language
Screening: Academy
Verdict: Chaplinesque Italian comedian Benigni's valentine to love is an anti-war film without political bite but full of winsome charm
