La vita è bella / Жизнь прекрасна (1979) - Grigory Chukhray

Italian Poster:



Soviet Poster:



https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080101/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_I...ul_(1979_film)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%96...C%D0%BC,_1980)

Introduction:

This is a joint Soviet-Italian co-production, filmed in Portugal in 1979, about the portuguese secret/political police (PIDE/DGS) set just before the 1974 Portuguese Revolution, that deposed the Fascist Regime. This film is not known in Portugal, due to strong geopolitical and diplomatic reasons.

This is also a very obscure and rare film, although it was directed by an elite Soviet Director, that became famous in Cannes and was awarded several film prizes, here is a picture of the guy, please note that some of those medals are artistic medals for his films and career, they are not only WW2 combat medals:



Modern Wikipedia articles (even from 2020) written in russian, will have a Wikipedia medals section. This feels culturally strange for me, but in russian language Wikipedia you can hover your mouse over each medal/award icon and a description will pop up, you can use Google Chrome browser's auto-translate feature to investigate Grigory Chukhrai's Cinema awards:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A7...B2%D0%B8%D1%87

I don't care much about medals, I just find this funny. But I do care about the other great films this guy directed, which I may comment later.

My goal will be to comment this obscure (but good and mature) film from a portuguese perspective, and also as a fan of soviet Cinema, for now I will share one of my three trailers, that were originally done for a portuguese audience.



A few notes:

a) The film is available for free, with english subtitles, on the official Mosfilm (the biggest russian Film studio of the Soviet Era) You Tube channel, but you should hold on and wait for me to explain and comment the film, on my following posts, in order to grasp what was the situation in Portugal, regarding the colonial war in Africa, the secret police, and what happened when an original european 1930's Fascist Regime, was allowed to exist and thrive well into the 1970's due to the WW2 neutrality.

b) The trailer above is my only "cute" one, the next two will be serious.

c) The private italian producer Quattro Cavalli Cinematografica provided those two famous movie stars, while the Soviet government would provide the money. The italians were also supposed to provided knowledge of Portugal, which the soviet crew lacked, because of the cold war, Fascist Portugal beeing a mortal enemy of Communist Russia untill 1974, and by 1979 falling under the political influence of the USA.

The italians failed... but Grigory Chukhrai managed to salvage the film.

Plot summary from russian wikipedia:

The action takes place in an unnamed country (in foreign annotations, Portugal is directly indicated during the Salazar era ), where a military junta rules, brutally suppressing any free thinking. Antonio Murillo, a former military pilot who was fired from the army for refusing to sink a ship with refugees, now drives a taxi, occasionally witnessing the arbitrariness of the authorities. His friend the waitress Maria is a member of the underground fighting against the dictatorship. Antonio, for all his dislike of the junta, is not interested in politics, his dream is to save money and become a pilot again by getting his own plane. But then one day he gave a ride to a man who turned out to be an oppositionist in his taxi, and came to the attention of the special services. As a result, because of the provocateur, he ends up in prison, where there are already several underground fighters, and is tortured.

I've seen two other lovely films by the director Grigory Chukhray.

His first film is 1956's "Forty-first".



The story is about a bad-ass female Red Army sniper, during the 1917 Revolution, that misses her 41st confirmed kill of a White Army officer, and instead is ordered to take him prisioner. Due to a series of events, she ends up cast away with him on an island. This script would be forbidden by the american Production Code.

His second film is 1959's "The Ballad of a Soldier", a master-piece. I have a musical montage with an american song (the cinematography is wonderful):



Back to 1979's "Life is Beautiful"!

The film being discussed was filmed in Lisbon, the city were I was born, and one of the camera operators was one of this Mosfilm Studio cameraman masters. Those soviet guys are renown for their tracking shots, circular staging setups, and other acclaimed filming techniques. But as I mentioned earlier the italian crew was incompetent in their supposed knowledge of Portugal, lets see another trailer of mine, this one is grim:



Although this picture was filmed in all the historically correct locales, no one hired a portuguese consultant, so there are strange things like a plaque in a doctor's office that spells "Dott. Gomez", that is italian crap, because in portuguese it would read "Dr. Gomes", then we have the wrong type of police cars, police uniforms, and many other wrong details. In my other trailer you can see Pepsi-Cola in a Café, that like Coca-Cola was illegal during the fascist period, the reason for this ban?

Well the reason for banning Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, but allowing Canada Dry Spur Cola is the following:

Dictatorship! In a dictatorship there is a dictator that dictates, if a dictator makes a mistake and you question the mistake, you will be arrested in the middle of the night, while sleeping in your home, and taken to a military fort to be tortured for questioning the logic of a dictatorship.

As far as I can tell, some government guy in the late 1920's early 1930's declared Coca-Cola illegal because the name suggested the drug "Coca" (short for Cocaína), Pepsi-Cola was banned because the brand name was similar to Coca-Cola. But "Canada Dry" Spur Cola was allowed because the bottle's large letters spelled simply "Canada Dry". I didn't even knew until recently that Canada Dry made Ginger Ale, for me "Canada Dry" was just a brand of Cola. My father would smuggle, in the trunk of his car, a few bottles of Coca-Cola from Franco's Spain for my sister. It was not dangerous because it was not a political smuggling (just some soda for a small child).

The director explained in a interview that he was ashamed of this film, and blamed the italian crew, for not doing their job. These flaws would be considered normal in a Hollywood film "Hey, it's just a movie, if you want realism go watch a documentary!".

But if you translate the director's Wikipedia page from russian, you will notice "Direction: socialist realism" in his summarized profile. Realism is what defines Soviet Cinema, at least for me as a fan. Simply put Soviet Cinema had many directors like Stanley Kubrick (who was not a Hollywood yes-man).

Regarding the police state aspect as shown in the above trailer and in the film, I consider that it nailed fascist Portugal just before the bloodless Revolution of 25th April 1974.

Salazar was from the same Era as Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, he was one of the original fascist dictators of Europe. In the early 1970's if four friends would sit a Café, and talked, they would be arrested for the crime of gathering with the intent of subversion, and would be sent to a military fort, to be tortured, and perhaps killed. It was a political crime the gathering of four persons, outside of a work environment or a wedding, etc.

People would be taken from their homes, during the night, like the trailer shows. One of the first portuguese laws passed after the Revolution, was forbidding nightly house searches by the police. To this day, the portuguese police can only search a home, with a warrant, during the day time. So this film nailed this aspect pretty good.

Finally my main trailer, if you still have patience:



Notice the old portuguese drunk guy, oblivious of his surroundings, he looks like a real drunk, not an actor or an extra, that sort of thing is "Soviet Realism".

I'm too tired to write more comments, so I will just post the oficial You Tube link for the Mosfilm complete version, with english subtitles, for those who want to watch this. But I would recommend watching the earlier Grigory Chukhray films (that are also free on You Tube) first.